The Geopolitics of Power Projection in US Foreign Policy: From Colonization to Globalization

This Chapter studies continuity and innovation in the geopolitics of America in projecting power beyond legally recognized borders. Exporting cultural symbols expressing what America has on offer plays as crucial a role in the opening of societies beyond borders as commodity exports and the activities of the CIA and the US Air Force do. The historical part summarizes early experience and aims at uncovering continuity in the foreign policy of getting America offshore. The hypothesis is that the US objective of inserting power and influence in West and CEA is to deny to a single state, other than the US itself, or coalition of powers not including the US, the capability to set conditions for accessing the energy resources of West and CEA. Our argument is that such a dominating coalition of actors not including the US, would arise from the creation of overland energy and other transportation links among the industries of Western Europe, Russia, Turkey, Northeast Asia, and China, leading to economic unification of Eurasia. Economic unification by creating overland energy and transport links of much of Eurasia would deprive the US navy of its power to interdict supplies of oil and food to core industrial areas of Eurasia and Japan. The reassertion of Russian power in the Caucasus and Central Asia should therefore be prevented. The EU and Japan should be prevented from developing autonomous military power and be kept dependent on maritime transported energy and food supplies. China should not host pipelines connecting energy resources of West Asia and CEA with the industries of Japan and Korea, whose unification and economic and strategic merger with China should be prevented. Iraq, Iran, and the Saudi Kingdom should be reformed into powers friendly of the US. Energy unification by overland transport systems, leading to economic unification between industries of these entities, would give major powers of the Asian landmass the potential for setting conditions for the US state and non-state actors to access the resources on the largest of world's islands. Such a power shift between the world's continents would reduce the Western Hemisphere to a rather dependent offshore island between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.