The Rimland Thesis & US Containment: Spykman's Rimland Thesis

 

The Rimland Thesis & U.S. Containment

Spykman’s Rimland Thesis

 

 Introduction

“Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia;

Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the World.”

With these words, the Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman (or ‘Speak-man’) summarized his geopolitical theory on the global distribution of power. Though overshadowed by his British contemporary Halford Mackinder, whose ‘Heartland Thesis’ served as the foundation for his own ideas, Spykman has arguably had a greater impact on global strategymaking, with his ‘Rimland Thesis’ often regarded as a key inspiration for the policy of ‘containment’ that the US pursued against the Soviet Union during the Cold War – and likely against China today.

This mini-series will be divided into two parts: Part One will introduce the Rimland Thesis itself, while Part Two will consider the Thesis’ influence on US containment policy during the late 1940s and 2020s. In this video, we’ll outline Spykman’s Rimland Thesis, and place it within the context of its two main influences: Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Thesis and – as a counterpoint – interwar American isolationism. We’ll see how Spykman developed his theory in response to their assertions, discuss its implications for US foreign policy, and finally evaluate its strengths and limitations.

 

1. Context: American Isolationism

Nicholas Spykman began his career as a diplomat for the Netherlands, before emigrating to the United States and becoming a professor of international relations at Yale University by the early 1930s. Throughout his career, he also dabbled in journalism and punditry, writing commentary on the various hot-button topics of the interwar period, ranging from the restructuring of Europe’s World War One debt to the rise of Asian nationalism.

But above all, the key issue of the 1930s centered on the international crises festering on the Eurasian continent, and whether America should intervene to stop Germany and Japan from dominating Continental Europe and East Asia respectively. Yale, in particular, was the intellectual heart of American isolationism, being the home of the ‘America First Committee’ which sought to stop President Roosevelt from acting against Germany. Within this environment, Spykman became a rather lonely but nevertheless steadfast advocate for intervention, arguing instead that it was in America’s best interests to involve itself with these seemingly-distant conflicts.

Generally speaking, there were three types of interwar American isolationism, distinguishable by the level of intervention they were willing to accept. First was pure isolationism, which argued that, thanks to its formidable defensive position behind two oceans, America could not be threatened by any other country. There was therefore no need for the US to meddle in the affairs of others, and such profane ‘power politics’ would only drag the country further away from its exceptional moral calling as the quote-unquote ‘City on a Hill’.

Second was ‘Hemispheric Defense’, which acknowledged that the US needed to secure the Western Hemisphere against any potential Eurasian invasion, but rejected the need to deploy power over on Eurasia itself. This became the official stance of the Roosevelt Administration when World War Two broke out in 1939, with the US proactively and sometimes forcibly intervening against regional Latin American states and European colonies, but otherwise staying out of the conflict raging over on the so-called ‘Old World’.

Third was idealistic internationalism, which argued that unilateral American intervention was no longer necessary thanks to the rise of international law, as embodied by supra-national institutions such as the League of Nations. Disputes that once had to be resolved through military force could now be settled through legal reasoning at the League, which could levy various moral, economic or military sanctions on behalf of the international community if the losing party refused to comply.

While rejecting all three isolationisms, Spykman nevertheless recognized that these sentiments were deeply rooted within US history and culture, with many of the country’s so-called ‘ideological touchstones’ such as Washington’s Farewell Address – ‘Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none or a very remote relation’ – or John Quincy Adams’ famous advice that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’ – serving to permanently bias much of the American public against intervention, regardless of the fact that they had been said in a radically different and crucially pre-industrial context.

Consequently, in addition to advocating for intervention, Spykman also sought to develop new ‘ideological touchstones’ that would update the US’ worldview to account for industrial geopolitical reality. Much of his brief career as a strategist was therefore spent attempting to achieve just that, whether through journalism, punditry, writing books, or even co-founding a think-tank. All this was meant to culminate in a magnum opus where Spykman would lay out his Thesis on geopolitics, but this was cut short when he suddenly died in 1943.

After his death, sympathetic colleagues reconstructed Spykman’s thinking out from incomplete drafts and lecture notes, but as they did so, they inevitably added their own ideas into the mix. As a result, what we now call Spykman’s ‘Rimland Thesis’ is likely not exactly what the man believed; instead, it is better to see it as a combination of Spykman’s geographic analysis blended with a number of similar geopolitical viewpoints, many of which would soon evolve into what would be known as the ‘realist’ school of international relations.

 

2. International Struggle & the Balance of Power

Spykman begins by asserting that – as much as the isolationists might wish otherwise – the US fundamentally cannot avoid power politics. His reasoning will sound very familiar to anybody versed in international relations realism: the international system is anarchic, which means that there is no overarching authority to resolve disputes between states, which in turn means that states can rely only on their own power to defend themselves and their interests from being dominated by others.

This means that the only real security comes from having more power than anybody else: but as states work towards this goal, their growing strength by definition generates insecurity in other states, who must now also advance their own power for fear of being dominated, causing the cycle to repeat itself once more. International life is therefore a never-ending power struggle, with Spykman even pessimistically declaring that peace is only ever a ‘Temporary Armistice’!

Contrary to the hopes of the idealistic internationalists, international law cannot abolish this fundamental dynamic. At best, it provides an alternate platform for states to continue the power struggle through non-military means: and while it might be better to fight ‘paper wars’ than actual wars – to use Spykman’s humorous description of Britain, America and Japan’s attempts to quote-unquote ‘sink’ each others’ fleets at the interwar Naval Disarmament Conferences – states will only comply if they believe that non-compliance will be punished with sufficient power and especially military power.

And since no institution has yet obtained the power to independently enforce international law, this means that their ability to punish lawbreakers ultimately still depends on whether member states agree to do so on their behalf, and in turn, whether said states feel it is in their interest or ability to do so. As such, merely trusting in institutional sanctions without considering the power politics behind them risks rendering international law completely impotent, as demonstrated throughout the 1930s when the League of Nations repeatedly condemned Japanese, Italian and German aggression, only for its member states to refuse to take action.

Despite this rather grim and Darwinian depiction of the international power struggle, Spykman still finds a silver lining inside of it. For as states seek to grow in power while preventing others from doing the same, their collective actions often result in an equilibrium famously known as the ‘Balance of Power’, where states sort themselves into coalitions of similar strength. With no one having excess power to dominate anyone else, Balances of Power can still produce reasonably idealistic outcomes, where each state retains the freedom to pursue its own path, while simultaneously being incentivized to develop to its maximum possible potential.

But unfortunately, power also happens to be one of the most dynamic phenomena known to mankind, with many factors feeding into it and some even capable of generating significant fluctuations that can disrupt or even overturn the Balance. Setting aside individual-level influences that are too small for this level of analysis, one of the key factors affecting power is: technology. As technology advances, not only do people utilize resources better, they may also make significant breakthroughs that render anything that came before obsolete. These generally cause state power to grow dramatically

To accommodate such growth, especially when it is concentrated in a single state, the Balance of Power must be periodically re-adjusted, often involving more and more countries on an increasingly permanent basis. A particularly relevant example for Spykman here was the international effort to balance out Germany, whose immense yet latent power potential was first unlocked through unification, then through mass industrialization. As a result, a power that had previously been held in check by Austria and Russia soon required the strength of first France to balance, then before long, Britain as well.

Even then, the grueling course of World War One showed that this counter-coalition was still not strong enough to overcome Germany, and only with the added might of the United States could a stable Balance be restored. By implication, should America no longer intervene in Europe, German power would once again be unchecked, potentially opening the door for the country to launch yet another attempt at domination. Like it or not, American strength was now a core component of the interwar European Balance of Power.

 

3. Mackinder’s Heartland Thesis

So far, Spykman has provided a moral justification for the Balance of Power, and also shown why American intervention was required to maintain such a Balance in interwar Europe. Now, we come to the core arguments of his Thesis, which aim to show why it is in the US’ self-interest to actively maintain this Balance of Power, not just in Europe, but all across Eurasia in general.

To begin, Spykman highlights another key factor in state power: geography. As a territorial entity, a state’s strength is ultimately derived from the material and human resources found within its borders, but its location, shape, topography and climate will also modify how efficiently this power can be mobilized or deployed against others. As mentioned previously, technology can in turn influence these modifiers: in particular, Spykman notes how advances in transport technology have diminished the defensive bonuses that the oceans once provided, warning that trans-oceanic invasions, particularly against thinly-held territories, can no longer be dismissed as a complete impossibility.

Since geography plays a fundamental role in determining state power, Spykman finds value in using geostrategic analysis to see which states could potentially be strong enough to threaten America’s security and well-being. In fact, much of the work here had already been done three decades earlier by the pioneering British geostrategist Halford Mackinder, whose ‘Heartland Thesis’ forms the intellectual foundation for Spykman’s subsequent analysis.

For a focused discussion on the Heartland Thesis, please watch my video on the subject: but in short, Mackinder points out that the vast majority of the world’s resources are located on Eurasia, which means that if a single state or coalition were to dominate it, said entity would have more than enough power to overwhelm and dominate the Western Hemisphere. While Mackinder primarily argued in terms of military power, Spykman notes that his argument still applies to economic or political warfare: with most of the world’s resources and markets under its control, a pan-Eurasian empire could easily cripple a pan-American economy by stopping all trade with the latter, even as it handily outbids the US for the allegiance of the remaining states.

Even if this dire scenario did not come to pass, a US that had to balance out the power of a pan-Eurasian empire would have to mobilize its own resources so thoroughly that its existing political system and culture would have to be dismantled in the name of self-defense. It is therefore in America’s best interest – militarily, economically and morally – to prevent Eurasia from coming under a single ruler or coalition.

 

So which countries are the most likely to attempt a Eurasian unification? Mackinder famously answers this by dividing Eurasia into two primary regions: First, there is the central ‘Heartland’, isolated from the rest of the continent by a ring of difficult natural barriers; and Second, there is what Spykman terms the ‘Rimland’, consisting of the geographically-narrow but resource-rich coastal strips sandwiched between the southern edge of the Heartland and the seas surrounding Eurasia.

Impressed by the Heartland’s combination of centrality and defensibility, Mackinder identifies it as the likeliest starting point for any Eurasian conquest. He imagines a future Heartland state – either Russia or a Greater Germany – overlaying the Heartland with advanced transportation networks to speed up army movements on already-short interior lines, which would allow them to surprise, outmaneuver, split and defeat any Rimland opposition, ultimately resulting in a fearsome industrial equivalent of the continent-wide Mongol Empire.

To counter this, Mackinder advises strategymakers to focus attention on the Heartland, encouraging its political fragmentation while allying with Rimland states in a defensive coalition. This led Mackinder to specifically promote the independence of Eastern European states after World War One, with Britain, France and the US guaranteeing their sovereignty against future Soviet aggression. Such an arrangement, Mackinder believed, would block the Heartland power from dominating the European Rimland, resulting in a stable Balance of Power at minimal cost to all.

 

4. Spykman’s Rimland Thesis

Of course, Mackinder’s hopes for a stable equilibrium were not borne out, and within two decades, Europe was once again at war. To Mackinder, this failure came about because British and American isolationists did not follow his advice; however, it’s likely that Spykman would have attributed it instead to the flaws in Mackinder’s geostrategic thought. After all, if a Thesis’ assumptions do not align with geographic reality, the Balance of Power it seeks to create will also be misaligned and therefore doomed to fail. Perhaps British strategymakers here had focused too much attention on balancing against the Soviet Heartland state, underestimating the threat of a resurgent Germany in the process.

While Spykman agrees with Mackinder regarding the distribution of power between Eurasia and the Americas, as well as on the division of Eurasia into Heartland and Rimland, he differs when it comes to the distribution of power between the Heartland and the Rimland. With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Spykman asserts that the ‘power modifiers’ provided by the Heartland’s geography were simply not as strong as Mackinder had assumed. The natural barriers that blocked an invasion of the Heartland would also block an invasion out of the Heartland; and whatever speed advantages gained from the Heartland’s central position would be more than compensated for by the vast efficiencies enjoyed by seaborne transport. Spykman also lists the Heartland’s resource poverty as an additional limitation, though to be fair, Mackinder openly acknowledged this, arguing that the Heartland’s resources would largely be gained through conquering the Rimland instead.

 

In any case, Spykman’s reduced estimate of Heartland power leads him to a geostrategic stance that is the exact opposite of Mackinder’s: rather than the Heartland, the region most likely to unite Eurasia is, in fact, the Rimland. Besides Heartland weakness, Spykman justifies his view by identifying 3 sources of Rimland strength: Firstly and simply, the region already holds most of Eurasia’s resource wealth; Secondly, its proximity to the ocean means that Rimland states are already linked to each other via a network of coastal seas, which – especially with industrial naval technology – essentially function as a so-called ‘Maritime Circumferential Highway’ that facilitates the flow of state power and therefore unification.

Finally, Spykman also sees the Rimland as the region where power is at its most dynamic. Geographically isolated regions – like the Americas or the Heartland – tend to be shielded from many political threats; by contrast, within the Rimland – cramped, barrier-less, and ‘amphibiously’ exposed to both continental and oceanic intervention – states are maximally-challenged to strengthen themselves or risk being dominated by neighbors, becoming highly adept at power struggle as a result. While their collective efforts usually result in a local Balance of Power, technology, development, political reform or even individual leadership can – as we’ve seen – trigger sudden surges in strength, which in the hands of an adept state can overturn the existing Balance of Power and open the door to an attempt at domination.

To Spykman, his ‘Rimland Thesis’ aligns better with geographic reality compared to Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Thesis’, particularly when viewed through the lens of history. While recognizing the possibility of a Heartland-Rimland confrontation, Spykman observes that this is just one of several geopolitical patterns in European history – and really, not even the most common one. Instead, conflicts between Rimland states were a far more frequent occurrence; and in fact, 3 of the 4 largest European wars between 1750 and 1940 involved the Heartland Power – Russia – teaming up with a so-called ‘Oceanic Power’ – first Great Britain, then the United States – to defeat a Rimland power seeking regional domination, in the form of Revolutionary France, Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany.

As such, both geostrategic logic and historical evidence seem to support Spykman’s assertion that the Rimland poses a greater threat to the current Eurasian order – and therefore to America’s core interests – than the Heartland does. However, not all Rimland territories are created equal, and only a few subregions have the potential to fuel serious attempts at domination. These are precisely the places where the United States must pay attention to and intervene in order to maintain the subregional Balance of Power, ensuring that no local state gains the unbalanced strength to dominate its subregion and use it as a launchpad to conquer first the Rimland, then Eurasia.

To Spykman, a powerful Rimland territory is one with significant material and human resource wealth, though he excludes South Asia from consideration based on its perceived low development as of the 1940s. This leaves him with two subregions, which – not entirely coincidentally – were also where the two key Axis powers of World War Two were located. They are: Western Europe and East Asia.

That said, Germany and Japan are hardly the only states the US needs to counter in order to maintain the subregional Balance of Power. While – as mentioned before – Germany is the biggest threat in Western Europe due to its inability to be balanced by other European states alone, Spykman also sees Britain and France as potential hegemons, not to mention the Soviet Heartland state which he speculated might quite literally take over Germany’s former position and become the new concern. Similarly in East Asia, while Japan was the threat of the day during the 1940s, Spykman notes the potential for the Soviet Union and especially a developed China to dominate the subregion and from there, expand towards Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in their quest for Rimland domination.

 

5. US Policy towards the Rimland

Having explained why it is in America’s best interest to intervene decisively in Eurasian conflicts, especially in Western Europe and East Asia, the only question left for Spykman to answer is: what should American intervention look like?

Here, Spykman – like many geostrategists – begins by emphasizing the advantageous geopolitical position of the United States. Although advances in naval technology have reduced the defensive value of its oceanic ‘moats’, the US remains unique in that it already dominates its own region of the Western Hemisphere. No coalition of other American states can balance out its might, which means that – similar to a dominant Eurasian empire – the US has a quantity of unbalanced power to project across the oceans onto Eurasia.

As seen earlier, Spykman proposes that the US should deploy this power primarily in Western Europe and East Asia, with the goal of maintaining their subregional Balances of Power and preventing any of their local states from having the excess strength to attempt domination. This entails adopting an unsentimental, flexible approach to foreign relations, echoing British Prime Minister Palmerston’s maxim of having ‘no eternal allies, and… no perpetual enemies’. To Spykman, this would not actually be a radical departure from historical American practice, noting that, despite its lofty rhetoric, the US has often sought to cut even its allies down to size, as seen in its attempts to limit British naval power both before and after they had fought together in World War One!

A few policies merit specific attention: First is the role of international law within the Rimland Thesis. Contrary to what international realism is often caricatured as, Spykman actually sees laws and institutions as useful tools in maintaining the subregional Balance of Power: they allow the power struggle to carry on in a less-violent, more-structured form, and by being neutral arbitrators, they can also call in and guide American intervention in a minimally-biased way.

But as Spykman noted at the start, the effectiveness of international law ultimately rests on whether states see it in their interest to enforce legal judgments. Accordingly, instead of a cumbersome global League of Nations, Spykman instead recommends a constellation of subregional Leagues, ensuring that member states have a greater stake in what is being discussed and will therefore act in a way that better upholds the Balance of Power.

The Second policy involves territorial adjustments in Western Europe and East Asia. While Spykman’s logic for American intervention has little time for moral or historical considerations, a subregional Balance of Power is much easier maintained when the states involved are all equal in strength. To this end, it may be in America’s interest to reconstruct the post-World War II landscape with this in mind, breaking up overly-powerful states like Germany and China while consolidating weaker polities like the Benelux countries in order to create a more equal distribution of power.

Indeed, contrary to what he – or perhaps more accurately his colleagues – advised in his final book, Spykman likely would not have called for the unconditional surrender of either Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, reasoning that – as odious as these regimes were – their complete destruction would only render them unable to contribute to a new Balance of Power against the Soviet Union or China. In a similar vein, Spykman’s laser focus on Balance also led him to oppose the idea of a democratic ‘European Union’ as a solution to the subregion’s instability, since this would effectively cede Western Europe, the Rimland and therefore Eurasia to the EU, and in his eyes, not even liberal regimes are immune to the ambition of winning the international power struggle.

Finally, the Third policy is about the specific importance of the UK and Japan within Spykman’s geostrategy. As coastal islands lying just off the edges of continental Eurasia, both states historically played – or could have played, in Japan’s case – significant roles as ‘external balancers’ for their subregions, able to send an exceptionally-high proportion of their power overseas thanks to their geographic defensibility. And while these roles have become obsolete thanks to their modern vulnerability to advanced naval and air attack, their geographic location has given them a new importance as primary staging points for any US intervention onto continental Eurasia. As such, despite Spykman’s earlier call for US intervention to be done as impartially as possible, effective action in Western Europe or East Asia is simply impossible without British or Japanese cooperation, and so, for as long as the subregional Balance of Power requires its help, America has to maintain active alliances with them.

Ultimately, to Spykman, the goal of US intervention should, paradoxically, be: non-intervention! By proactively engaging overseas, countering overly-powerful states, and equalizing the distribution of power within Western Europe and East Asia, the US can gradually construct a stable equilibrium in Eurasia, one that could be maintained by local states without American involvement. Such an outcome would be an ideal union of America’s moral and material interests, allowing the US to step back from power politics without jeopardizing its security. Indeed, under such a Balance of Power, all states would be able to enjoy such peace and prosperity – at least, until something comes in to destabilize the entire Balance once again.

6. Assessment & Conclusions

Spykman intended his ‘Rimland Thesis’ to become a new ‘ideological touchstone’ justifying US intervention in Eurasia, a policy which he saw as essential for American security and prosperity. To an extent, he succeeded: the Thesis is widely seen as having shaped the US’ ‘containment’ policy against the Soviet Union during the early Cold War, even if it’s uncertain – though likely – whether George Kennan, the mastermind behind containment, ever read Spykman’s works. Certainly, one of the architects of the 2024 Trump Administration’s defense strategy, Elbridge Colby, takes inspiration from Spykman.

Nevertheless, despite its policy influence, the Rimland Thesis has largely been overlooked in the public consciousness. This may be due to it being a fundamentally derivative work, as Spykman’s geostrategic analysis is built on Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Thesis’, while his insights on the international power struggle have been absorbed into the broader framework of international relations realism. It also didn’t help that Spykman died before he could promote his ideas and especially contribute to the construction of US Cold War strategy.

At the same time, the Rimland Thesis is not perfect, and there are flaws in Spykman’s thinking that limit its usefulness as a geostrategic guide. In particular, we will highlight 3 notable problems that US strategymakers encountered as they tried to implement Spykman’s ideas as part of containment.

Firstly, the central aim of the Rimland Thesis and arguably international relations realism – maintaining a Balance of Power between states – fits in poorly with modern democratic politics. In many ways, Spykman’s interventionist US foreign policy – with its self-interested distant wars, flexible swapping of allies and enemies, and indifference to historical and moral justice – is better suited to the European ‘Cabinet Diplomacy’ of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, where absolute monarchs made policy with little public accountability.

By contrast, modern democratic voters have typically demanded a less cynical foreign policy, often insisting – rightly or wrongly – on a diplomacy that is both based on universal principles and reflects a dualistic worldview of ‘good’ allies and ‘bad’ enemies. This political reality has frustrated many realist strategymakers, many of whom either find themselves in disillusioned exile – like Kennan – or are compelled to hide their efforts from public view.

Another critique that can be levied against both Spykman and international relations realism centers on what Kennan termed ‘overmilitarization’, where there is an almost exclusive focus on military force as the only meaningful form of power. While Spykman recognized the potential of political and economic power, his Rimland Thesis still crudely assumed that these forces would be subject to physical geography, as if state influence and capital were like armies that had to first travel around the Eurasian Rimland before they could try and dominate the United States.

Granted, Spykman died before nuclear weapons made unconstrained military competition untenable for humanity, and he also did not live to see the development of complex global supply chains which exposed state economies to the possibility of geoeconomic coercion. Indeed, even today the military aspects of geopolitics still command an overwhelming degree of attention, partly due to the lack of any quote-unquote ‘maps’ of the geoeconomic or political influence spaces that could serve as a common framework to guide non-specialist discussion.

In any case, ‘overmilitarization’ encourages an exclusively pessimistic view of the international power struggle that is not supported by history. There are other ways of achieving peace beyond the tense stalemate of the Balance of Power: one alternative approach involves promoting international law, supra-national institutions, and liberal politics, which, rather than merely being alternative channels for state power, can independently restrain states from arbitrary aggression and therefore reduce their perceived threat to others. By dismissing these methods, realists like Spykman and especially Kennan overlooked the transformative potential of efforts such as the Allied reconstruction of Germany and Japan post-World War Two, which successfully reconciled these former belligerents to the existing international order even after they had regained the strength to challenge it once more.

One final critique that is unique to the Rimland Thesis has to do with the scope of American intervention in Eurasia. Spykman asserts that American security is closely linked to Eurasia’s political balance, but recognizes that the US does not have the resources to intervene everywhere on the continent. This is why he proposes limiting US intervention to what he sees as the Rimland’s core subregions: namely Western Europe, East Asia and possibly modern South Asia.

However, Spykman’s attempt to draw lines in the sand clashes with another of his geographic assertions, which is that all parts of the Eurasian Rimland are closely connected via the ‘Maritime Circumferential Highway’ of coastal seas. If – as Spykman suggests – power can flow smoothly along this Highway to access any point on the Rimland, then changes occurring outside the core subregions would inevitably travel back to the cores and potentially cause power shifts there. Logically, this means that, in order to maintain stable Balances of Power within the Rimland cores, the US has to intervene in the non-core Rimland as well.

This point is hardly academic nitpicking: it lies at the heart of what would be known as ‘domino theory’, which argues that the US must intervene against unwelcome political changes anywhere, if only to prevent them from eventually affecting its core interests. As we’ll explore in the next video, the logic of domino theory can be very appealing, even to staunch realists like Kennan, and its call to intervene widely across the Rimland meshes quite well with the universalist ambitions of modern democratic politics. However, if unchecked, domino theory will ultimately saddle the US with far too many strategically-unproductive commitments, which during the Cold War led to its infamous overstretch, exhaustion and withdrawal in the Vietnam War.

 

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Ultimately, despite its flaws, Nicholas Spykman’s Rimland Thesis remains a vital framework for understanding global geopolitics. By highlighting the geostrategic importance of the Eurasian Rimland and urging active US intervention to maintain a Balance of Power amongst the Rimland states, Spykman challenged the isolationist tendencies of his era and laid the intellectual groundwork for the policy of containment during the Cold War and beyond. Though his realist viewpoint often clashes with modern democratic politics, Spykman’s thought endures as a powerful reminder that, in a modern and interconnected world, not even America can afford to be an island unto itself: it must actively shape the global order, or risk being shaped by it. The only real question is: how much should the US intervene, and what is the most effective way to do so?

 

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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. This is Part I of a II-Part series; the next video will use the Rimland Thesis to examine 2 periods of US containment policy: Firstly, the strategy of George Kennan against the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, and Second, the strategy of Elbridge Colby against China in the mid-2020s.