World affairs in the last few years have made a certain gloom descend upon strategic thought. One does not need to be a pessimist to sense that something fundamental has shifted in international politics. War is back, not as an aberration, but as a centrepiece of international relations.
Yet the return of war is only one part of the story I wish to tell. More striking is the ‘return of geopolitics’.
Barely a decade ago, the term was relegated to a somewhat unfashionable corner of international relations (IR) scholarship. The war colleges and military academies of the world continued to study war because of institutional mandates, and armed forces continued to war-game. But mainstream IR had moved elsewhere. Its preoccupations were the politics of globalisation, the promises and failures of economic interdependence, the challenges of democratisation, and the social consequences of global integration or exclusion.
The dominant questions, therefore, were geoeconomic rather than geopolitical.
Economic statecraft sat at the centre of policy discussions and research. An aspiring IR scholar was expected to know the history of the World Wars and perhaps the ethnic conflicts that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the intellectual energy and synergy of the discipline had moved on. Conflict found its space in new courses focused on asymmetric warfare, terrorism, non-state actors, and the political costs of military intervention, while conventional war was treated as an outdated phenomenon. Researchers who were still war-enthusiastic were frequently discouraged as reductionists from an older worldview.
But how quickly intellectual fashions change!
Today, geopolitics has returned with a vengeance. It has re-occupied the centre of strategic discourse and once again commands the attention of policymakers, scholars, and military planners alike. The best minds in the field find themselves grappling with questions of nineteenth-century strategists: How does geography shape power projection? What is the relationship between territory, resources, and political vision? How is the world organised in terms of interests, rivalries, and, unfortunately, war?
This column is not an overview of the conflicts of the last five years, important as they are. Rather, it is an attempt to revisit the older intellectual traditions that shaped how great powers understood their geography and conceived their grand strategy. For it is these underlying assumptions—formed over centuries—that continue to influence how nations see themselves and their place in the fast-changing world.
In many ways, this is an effort to connect old geopolitics with the new. And to ask whether India has kept up.
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Land, sea, and how different powers think
At its simplest, classical geopolitics is the study of how geography shapes statecraft. It says that a country’s international behaviour is influenced, though never entirely determined, by its physical environment, location, and access to resources. While the theory has evolved over time, this basic insight has sustained.
Historically, one can broadly distinguish between two grand strategic traditions: maritime powers and continental powers.
Most major powers have possessed both armies and navies, but the distinction underlines how states imagine power itself and the instruments they regard as most decisive in acquiring and maintaining influence.
The classic maritime powers were the great European empires and, later, the United States. The classic continental powers were Russia and China. Their differing geographies produced differing strategic imaginations and differing global implications.
In the European-centred world order, geopolitics emerged as a systematic field of study only during the nineteenth century. Following the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1871, geography increasingly came to be seen as a discipline with direct political effects. The German Reich and France established new academic positions—appointing scholars such as Paul Vidal de la Blache to the University of Nancy in France and Friedrich Ratzel to the Technical University of Munich to study political geography.
Yet even as continental Europe remained consumed by wars and absorbed the lessons of Carl von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (On War), Britain took a different course.
The British Empire accumulated wealth not through standing armies but through naval supremacy, colonial expansion, and its massive revenues. It maintained comparatively modest land forces while becoming the richest state in the world at the time.
It was, perhaps inevitable, that strategic thinkers would seek to explain these contrasting experiences.
One of the most influential was Sir Halford Mackinder, the first Reader in Geography at Oxford University.
His ideas would become some of the foundational concepts of twentieth-century geopolitics, focused on the “heartland” and “rimland” distinction. Writing in Democratic Ideals and Reality in 1919, he warned British policymakers against overestimating maritime supremacy because railways, industrialisation, and modern communications had altered the strategic balance. The vast Eurasian interior, long isolated by geography, could now be connected and mobilised.
His famous formulation remains one of the most quoted in geopolitical literature:
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
His ideas would later shape many of the assumptions underlying Cold War containment strategy.
Across the Atlantic, the United States was still developing its own strategic outlook.
Following independence and the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States spent much of the nineteenth century consolidating its continental position before becoming a maritime superpower.
When Napoleon Bonaparte needed cash, Washington purchased Louisiana in 1803. When Russia was short of cash, the US bought Alaska. When diplomacy and financial incentives didn’t work in dealing with Mexico, military force got them Texas.
Only later did American strategists begin to recognise the extraordinary advantages conferred by geography itself. Protected by two vast oceans and largely insulated from the bloody rivalries of Eurasia, the US developed a uniquely favourable strategic outlook.
It was Alfred Thayer Mahan who transformed this geographic reality into a coherent theory of power. In his seminal 1890 work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Mahan argued that national greatness depended not merely upon territory but upon control of maritime commerce and that wealth, influence and strategic reach flowed through the oceans.
Subsequent scholars have questioned whether Mahan and Mackinder were truly offering dichotomous visions. Philip Reid and others argued that the two thinkers were responding to different strategic circumstances. Maritime and continental strategies were not necessarily mutually exclusive and both are relevant in how Grand Strategies were formed.
This point became clearer with Nicholas John Spykman.
Writing during the Second World War in the US, Spykman accepted many of Mackinder’s observations but focused on the surrounding “Rimland”. In his view, the key question was not simply who controlled Eurasia’s interior but who controlled its coastal fringes. Despite advances in railways, aviation, and land transportation, Spykman argued that maritime control would remain essential for global influence.
His ideas profoundly influenced US grand strategy after 1945. The network of alliances, military bases and forward deployments stretching across Europe and Asia reflected precisely this logic.
India’s continental drift
Continental powers, however, approached statecraft differently.
Russia is the most quoted example. Despite having naval capabilities, Russian strategic culture has remained overwhelmingly territorial. Security has historically been envisioned through buffers, depth, and expansion across a contiguous land space.
The war in Ukraine, then, is a continuation of centuries-old strategic instincts. Naval power is important, but largely as a supporting instrument rather than the central pillar of Russian statecraft.
China’s historical experience, too, is similar. For centuries, Chinese dynasties expanded and contracted within continental space. Even Sun Tzu’s Art of War contains only tangential references to maritime affairs. The People’s Republic in 1949 inherited much of this land-centric worldview.
However, this began to change only relatively recently.
Although the CCP gradually adopted concepts such as ‘offshore defence’ after the Cold War, China’s transformation into a genuine maritime power accelerated under Xi Jinping. Since 2012—and especially after 2015—the People’s Liberation Army Navy has expanded at a remarkable pace. The assertion of China’s maritime claims through the nine-dash line and its growing presence in the Indian Ocean reflect a strategic shift from its long-standing historical vision.
For centuries, the Indian Ocean had largely been dominated by European empires, mainly the British, and later by the US. China’s entry compelled regional powers, particularly India, to reassess their own assumptions and doctrines.
India presents an interesting case because its geography is simultaneously continental and maritime. Yet Indian strategic thought has traditionally been continental in orientation. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, despite its sophisticated Mandala theory, is primarily concerned with managing power across land, while maritime affairs appear in relation to trade and commerce rather than power projection.
The great exception was the Chola Empire. Under Rajendra Chola and his son, Indian naval power projected influence across Southeast Asia, transforming the Bay of Bengal into a “Chola lake.”
That said, for much of modern history, India’s maritime statecraft remained rudimentary. Only the rise of China and the growing strategic importance of the maritime domain compelled a more serious maritime reorientation, which we today see articulated in doctrines such as SAGAR and MAHASAGAR, with myriad tools.
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New geopolitics
The old distinctions between maritime and continental powers remain useful, but they are no longer sufficient. Technology, cyberspace, multinational corporations, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and transnational networks have transformed the relationship between geography and power.
Geography still matters profoundly but it now interacts with new domains that Mackinder and Mahan could scarcely have imagined.
Power today resides not only in territory and sea lanes but also in semiconductor supply chains, undersea cables, rare earth minerals, satellite constellations, and AI—all altering the ways wars are started, fought, and sustained.
This complexity explains why geopolitics has become such a vibrant field once again, with a multiplicity of variables never available to history. The permutations of their weaponisation are also endless. Strategic thinkers now grapple simultaneously with the return of war and the weaponisation of everything.
And perhaps that is why revisiting the classics once in a while helps us understand where we are coming from.
Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
India is everywhere. India is nowhere. The columnist’s earlier observation is for the history books.