Foundational Principles of Geopolitical Strategy

In an open post, several people suggested enhanced discussions of geopolitical strategies.  This blog is not a political blog and such a discussion walks the fine line between military matters and politics.  Nonetheless, geopolitical strategy is the basis from which military strategy is derived so such a discussion is not out of bounds.  Of course, geopolitical strategy is a subject that can easily encompass a book or series of books!  With that in mind, we need to break any discussion down into bite-size, post-size, chunks. 

What I’d like to address first is the theoretical foundation of a geopolitical strategy.  There are certain guiding principles that should enter into any rational discussion of geopolitical strategy.  Let’s examine them.

Principle #1 - Natural (God given) Rights.  This is the very foundation of our country - that we are blessed by our creator with certain rights that do not derive from any government.  In fact, the job of the government is to secure, respect, and protect those rights.  The same holds true for every person and every country in the world.  Those countries that have governments that do not protect and respect those rights are, by definition, evil and must, in the due course of history, be eliminated.

This leads us to directly recognize the second principle.

Principle #2 – Not all countries are equal.  There are good countries and there are bad countries.  This immediately establishes that there are behaviors which we, as a country, should aspire to and others which we should be avoiding.  We must hold other countries to these same standards of behavior.  This also immediately eliminates the misguided notion that all countries are equal and deserve to be treated on equal footing.  They are not all equal and they do not all deserve to be treated equally.

Recognizing this reality, we now need to understand why it matters.  It matters because there is an ideal world which we are striving for.  This leads us directly to the third principle.

Principle #3 – The ultimate goal is a cooperative, mutually beneficial, world community.  Those countries who will not abide by the community rules must be prevented from acting in, and negatively affecting, the rest of the world community.  This establishes our right to act against those countries.  A simple analogy is a neighborhood community that sees a criminal gang attempting to move in.  The community is striving for a peaceful, cooperative environment and the means to do so is by adhering to standards of behavior, both legal and moral (mainly moral;  the legal flows from the moral).  A criminal gang flouts those standards and, in so doing, degrades the effort and results of the community.  Therefore, the community has the right to reject the gang and act against them.   Similarly, countries that do not follow the rules and standards of the world community are, by definition, immature and/or evil and we have the right, indeed obligation, to act against them and correct their behavior.

The challenge is how to change an immature/evil country’s behavior and this is what a strategy does.  It provides the methodological blueprint for affecting that change.  This leads us to the fourth principle.

Principle #4 - Minimal time period of immaturity.  There is no need or requirement for the rest of the world to suffer while waiting for a country to mature.

The idea of not waiting around for a country to mature is incredibly important.  The world waited for Hitler and Germany to mature.  They never did and a world war resulted.  How many more people died because we, and the world, waited instead of acting?  We’ve waited for NKorea to mature and, as a result, we’ve spent the last several decades watching and allowing their citizens to suffer ruthless oppression, allowing NKorea to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and tying up vast military resources on the Korea peninsula to guard against the various threats.  How many more NKorean people have suffered and died because we, and the world, have held off acting?  

The hard truth is that there are times when it is a mistake to try to avoid war.  Now, that's not to say we should leap straight to all out war at the first sign of a country performing some act that we find objectionable.  We should begin with politics, discussions, requests, warnings, and so on and then escalate, eventually, to more forceful actions such as sanctions, blockades, financial penalties, and so forth.  However, we must recognize when those actions are producing no benefits and then move to war, if necessary.  This is also where the Tomahawk diplomacy comes in (see, "The Daily Threat" for a bit more discussion of this concept).  

We don’t allow a child to occupy a co-equal place in society with adults.  Why?  Because they simply aren’t ready to make wise and responsible decisions.  When the child has sufficiently matured and demonstrated that maturity via a series of responsible actions (high school graduation, driver license, voting, job skill, paying taxes, etc.) then they are welcomed into society and are accorded the right to participate fully in society’s activities and benefits.  Some children never mature and wind up in jail where their societal rights are curtailed.  This is just common sense and we all instinctively understand that this is how a successful society must function.  Despite this common sense understanding we fail to apply it to the world community.  Instead, we accommodate and appease immature countries out of some misguided sense of equality.  The reality is that this isn’t equality, it’s moral cowardice.  For example, we’re afraid to call Iran the immature child that it is and correct it the way we should.  We’re afraid to identify China as the evil country that it is as it conducts illicit territorial seizures and ignores the rulings of tribunals established by treaties that it is a signatory to.  And so on.

With these few, simple principles well understood and firmly in hand, we can formulate a specific geopolitical strategy.  These principles give us our ultimate and short term goals, our justification for action, the definition of our relationships with other countries, and the imperative to act.  In fact, with these principles in mind, formulating a strategy becomes a fairly easy, straightforward task and the strategy should be fairly obvious to all.  The methods selected to achieve the strategy may be somewhat debatable but the fundamental principles eliminate most debate over the goals of the strategy itself.