Geopolitics By Other Means

The Asia-Pacific has become the Indo-Pacific region as the US, Japan, Australia and India have decided to join forces and scale-up their political, economic and security cooperation. The message coming from Washington, Tokyo, Canberra and New Delhi is clear: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is no longer the only game in town and Beijing’s policymakers better get ready for fierce competition. Japan’s ongoing and future “quality infrastructure” policies and investments in the Indo-Pacific in particular make it very clear that Tokyo wants a (much) bigger slice of the pie of infrastructure investments in the region. China’s territorial expansionism in the South China Sea and its increasing interests and presence in countries in South Asia have done their share to help the four aforesaid countries expand their security and defence ties. Beijing, of course, smells containment in all of this and it probably has a point. Who will have the upper hand in shaping and defining Asian security and providing developing South and Southeast Asia with badly-needed infrastructure: the US and Japan together with its allies or the increasingly assertive and uncompromising China and its Belt and Road Initiative?

Nations carry out geopolitical combat through economic means. Yet America often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris show that if U.S. policies are left uncorrected, the price in blood and treasure will only grow. Geoeconomic warfare requires a new vision of U.S. statecraft.

Nations carry out geopolitical combat through economic means. Yet America often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris show that if U.S. policies are left uncorrected, the price in blood and treasure will only grow. Geoeconomic warfare requires a new vision of U.S. statecraft.

Framing constitutes 'strategic action' that integrates 'discursive, political and sociological sub-processes' in order 'to achieve political potency' to be translated into strategic pay-offs. Media constructs frames that guide individuals, groups or collectives (state, society, social movements or other) to serve, if not willingly then at least unconsciously, the interests and purposes of potentially adversarial actors; thus inadvertently succumbing to their will. A make-believe world, so to speak, that creates a virtual reality in which individuals, groups or collectivities, are acted upon as mere objects, rather than being allowed to act as determining subjects. Potency is achieved when through foreign or adversarial media and mediatized outlets, people in societies do not define their own situation but in fact have the situation defined and interpreted for them. Then their own actions and their consequences become in reality produced and controlled by actors other than themselves. This methodology of framing and identity reconstruction contributes to identifying “the action system of the collective actor and the ways the different components of its action are kept together and translated in visible mobilization.” Frames thus entrap, causing psychological and strategic dislocation which springs from the sense of being trapped. They involve social engineering, indirectly implemented, in the service of hegemony and control. Clusters of concepts or a language, that carry “family resemblance” such as, media, mediatization, soft power, simulation, feigning, social movements, virtuality, indirect approach, propaganda, among others, contribute to the sense of being trapped. As framing devices they merge soft and hard power, aiming at instilling a sense of being defeated, or of being inevitably so in an adversary’s mental and psychological structure, reducing the need for direct, high intensity warfare to a minimum. Together with the cluster of family concepts, they combine into being instruments of high politics and actual vehicles of war, even if in an indirect way and as an indirect approach. For “the profoundest truth of war,” as Liddell Hart had put it, “is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.” In this sense, if war is politics by other means, as Carl von Clausewitz had argued, media has increasingly become war by other means.

This major reference collection highlights the contested and diverse nature of geopolitics and charts the controversial intellectual history of the field. Coined by the Swedish author, Rudolf Kjellén, the term 'geopolitics' highlights the role that territory, resources and boundaries play in shaping global political relations. The collection brings together work from international relations, political science, history, geography and law into a definitive collection that covers three dimensions of the geopolitical: classic geopolitics, critical geopolitics, and popular geopolitics.

In Geopolitics in Health, Eduardo J. Gómez takes a critical look at how the emerging BRICS economies dealt with the obesity, AIDS, and tuberculosis epidemics. Despite the countries having similar international political and economic ambitions, Gómez finds that domestic policy responses were driven mainly by international, as opposed to domestic, pressures and interests. Using a theoretical framework called geopolitical positioning, Gómez explores how nations respond to international pressures and policy criticisms, as well as offers of financial and technical assistance; countries then utilize domestic policy innovations and ultimately engage in global health diplomacy in order to bolster their international reputation. --Publisher description.

Carl von Clausewitz famously argued that "war is the continuation of politics by other means," and that aphorism remains as true in the 21st century as it was in the 19th: The future of warfare will depend on geopolitics. In this volume of the Future of Warfare series, RAND researchers examined six trends-U.S. polarization and retrenchment, China's rise, Asia's reassessment, the emergence of a revanchist Russia, upheaval in Europe, and turmoil in the Islamic world-to determine the drivers of conflict between now and 2030. Drawing on official strategy statements, secondary sources, and an extensive set of interviews across eight countries, this report explains how each of these trends has shaped conflict in the past and will likely continue to do so over the next decade. Together, these six trends point to three overarching findings. First, many of the underlying geopolitical assumptions in the U.S. National Defense Strategy for 2018-about the centrality of great-power competition and likelihood of aggression in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East-are correct. Second, although U.S. adversaries will likely remain relatively stable over the next decade, U.S. allies will likely change, especially as Europe becomes increasingly preoccupied with its own problems and as Asia reacts to the rise of China. Finally, and most importantly, U.S. strategists will face a deepening series of strategic dilemmas as the possibility of conflict in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East pull limited U.S. resources in different directions.