The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the course of history in two fundamental ways: The structure of the system went from bipolarity to unipolarity, and the geopolitical focus of the world shifted from Europe to Asia. International relations theorists have debated at length the dynamics and durability of unipolarity; whether and when competitor states will arise and if they can and will balance against the United States; the nature of hard and soft “balancing” under unipolarity; and what the United States can and cannot do to maintain its hyperpower status. In contrast, there has been no such discussion, much less debate, about the equally dramatic geopolitical shift from Europe to Asia. I suspect that the reason has little to do with the kind of change that is more important to an understanding of contemporary world politics. Indeed, one can reasonably argue that the new geopolitical realities will far outlast and have more impact on the trajectory of world history than the system's current unipolar structure.

Rather, the reason so little theoretical attention has been paid to the new geopolitics is that geography has been a neglected subject of international relations theory since the Nazi geopolitical strategist Karl Haushofer perverted the study of politics and geography into an ideologically motivated theory justifying aggression. Consequently, the typical introductory international relations syllabus features a subhead on polarity, while few, if any, contain a subhead on geography. Even at the graduate level, the justification for the occasional assigned text by Sir Halford Mackinder, Hans Morgenthau, or Nicholas Spykman on geopolitics has more to do with giving students a sense of the genealogy of the field than with directing them toward a productive theoretical approach.

In this latest attempt to put geopolitics back on the map, so to speak, Jakub Grygiel offers a theory that hinges on the interaction of three variables: (1) geography, which is composed of immutable features, such as rivers, mountains, seas, and climate; (2) geopolitics, which combines natural resources with human activity, such as production and communication technology that assign strategic value to places; and (3) geostrategy, which describes where a state directs its military and diplomatic efforts, that is, where it chooses to project its power and influence. The patterns of change across these variables range from tectonic (no change) in the case of geography to change measured in weeks or months at the level of geostrategy. In the middle of this range, geopolitical change spans decades and centuries with the rise and decline of centers of economic and natural resources and shifts in trade and communication routes, for example, the discoveries of new routes around Africa, linking Atlantic Europe directly with Asia in the late fifteenth century, and the current economic growth of East Asia and, in particular, China.

Grygiel's argument is a simple and straightforward one: Powerful states are ones that pursue a geostrategy consistent with geopolitical realities, and, in so doing, they increase their relative power position and are able to maintain it. Geopolitically savvy states advance up the ladder of power by accumulating wealth and leverage over others, threatening to deny access to the resources and routes they control. Conversely, states that fail to extend their control over resources and routes suffer relative decline as others fill the vacuum. All of this seems scarcely more than a truism, and the author admits as much. Sometimes, however, truisms get buried under the rubble of fashionable academic trends; an excavation is then needed to recover the essential realities that have been lost to these intellectual drifts.

The problem with Grygiel's core theoretical statement is not that it is obvious but, rather, that it is virtually nonfalsifiable and borders on tautology. It reminds me of Kenneth Waltz's dictum that those states that adhere to the structural imperatives of the international system survive and prosper, whereas those that ignore or attempt to thwart system structure lay themselves open to great dangers and may even fall by the wayside. To make these statements falsifiable and, therefore, testable by means of empirical observation, we need a precise specification of what it means to follow the dictates of geopolitics and, in the case of Waltz, system structure. For Waltz, this reduces to the basic claim that states must balance against, not bandwagon with, the stronger state or coalition. For Grygiel, the answer is much less clear. What does it mean to align the state's geostrategy to geopolitical realities? He outlines the various challenges to finding a geostrategy that reflect the underlying geopolitics, including the difficulty of “discovering” geopolitics, the clouding of individual strategists' perceptions due to ideological principles, domestic political concerns, sheer incompetence, and the uncertainty of forecasting geopolitical change. All of this is fine, but it does not tell us precisely what geopolitics dictates a state to do. This leaves us with the less than intellectually satisfying conclusion that if a state grows in relative power, its geostrategy must have been correct; if it declines, its geostrategy must have been faulty.

The bulk of the book (124 of the main text's 177 pages) examines the cases of Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and China in the fifteenth century. These case studies demonstrate Grygiel's exceptional gifts as a writer and historian of impeccable scholarly judgment. That said, problems arise because of the skeletal nature of the theoretical setup. In the Ottoman case, the author posits that states expand toward resources and access routes regardless of counterbalancing power, which explains why the Ottomans expanded toward Europe. This prediction, he claims, directly contradicts neorealism's “power vacuum” thesis, namely, that states expand only toward weaker regions. The problem, once again, is that Grygiel does not offer a full-blown theory of geopolitics and its relation to geostrategy, and so I cannot say where or how he derives this proposition about state behavior. Moreover, I am unaware of any neorealist power-vacuum thesis that makes the categorical claim that states “only expand” in weaker regions. Rather, realists of all stripes argue that states, like nature, abhor power vacuums. This logic does not imply that states only expand when a power vacuum appears or in the direction of weaker territories. Rather, power vacuums are sufficient, not necessary, causes of expansion.

Grygiel's motivation for writing the book is to further what he calls the “renaissance of geography” (p. 2). Has he succeeded? He makes a very compelling case that geography, geopolitics, and geostrategy are relevant factors in the rise and decline of great powers, past, present, and future (the last chapter offers a brief discussion of lessons for the United States). Great Powers and Geopolitical Change is a book that I believe deserves the attention of policymakers and scholars alike. For the reasons I stated at the opening, however, I doubt that it will be read by many of the latter, whose neglect of the study of geopolitics only deepens the field's diminishing relevance to actual foreign policy practice. I hope I am proven wrong.