It is easy to talk about the return of geopolitics. The more difficult question is which geopolitics has returned. When looking at the centers of gravity in international politics in recent years, a striking geographical pattern emerges. While European security is being reorganized along a line extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, in the Indo-Pacific, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the island and coastal geographies around the South China Sea are settling into the center of great power competition. The renewed strategic importance of ports, straits, submarine cables, energy routes, and military access points brings to mind the classic geopolitical debates of the twentieth century.
This picture necessitates a rereading of Nicholas J. Spykman rather than Halford Mackinder. At the center of the geopolitical approach put forward by Mackinder in 1904, there was a major transformation that could change the historical supremacy of sea power. This transformation was that railways made the vast interiors of Eurasia politically and militarily organizable. According to Mackinder, developments in modern land transportation could allow the power in the center of Eurasia to mobilize the continent’s resources more effectively.[i] This area, which he would conceptualize as the “Heartland” in his later works, settled at the center of his spatial model regarding world politics.
Spykman did not reject Mackinder’s approach, which treated geography as one of the fundamental variables of power distribution. But he shifted the center of gravity. For him, the decisive area of Eurasia was not only the vast interior region of the continent. The expansive Rimland, extending from Europe to the Middle East, from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia and the coasts of East Asia, was a strategic contact zone where land and sea powers met, where population and economic capacity were concentrated, and where major trade routes passed. Spykman’s 1942 work “America’s Strategy in World Politics,” in which he evaluated American foreign policy through the balance of power, also did not explain US security solely by the geographical features of the Western Hemisphere; it evaluated the distribution of power in Eurasia as one of the fundamental issues of American security.[ii]
This approach gained a clearer spatial form in his work “The Geography of the Peace,” published posthumously in 1944. Reversing Mackinder’s Eurasia-centric formula, Spykman argued that the truly decisive area in the global power struggle was the Rimland. The famous formula in his work summarized this. Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world. [iii]
However, it would be incomplete to read Spykman’s contribution to Mackinder solely as “Rimland instead of Heartland”. Spykman’s true importance should be sought in his emphasis on where the relationship between land and sea power takes place. Land power and sea power are not two disconnected strategic categories. They encounter each other on coasts, peninsulas, straits, ports, and transit zones opening to the seas. As Colin S. Gray emphasized in his evaluation of Spykman’s intellectual legacy, the Rimland is not merely a geographical area, but a fundamental strategic belt in the shaping of the balance of power in Eurasia and, consequently, the international order.[iv] From this perspective, what is remarkable in today’s world is not the renewed application of Spykman’s specific policies, but the renewed importance of the geographical questions he asked.
Europe is the first example of this. As of June 2026, NATO defines its deterrence and defense structure on its eastern flank over an integrated line extending from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The alliance’s nine multinational forward land forces in Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia are the institutional equivalent of this geographical concentration. It is important that this framework does not consist solely of land elements. The Baltic Sentry operation, launched in January 2025, has made the protection of critical submarine infrastructure in the Baltic Sea an explicit part of NATO’s military activities.[v]
Therefore, the reshaped security geography on Europe’s eastern flank relies on the protection of maritime areas, transportation routes, communication infrastructure, and strategic access, in addition to territorial defense. The picture emerging in the Black Sea makes this trend even more evident. The European Union’s May 2025 Black Sea strategy defines the region as an area providing connectivity between Europe and Asia and hosting strategic transit routes important for access to energy resources and critical raw materials. The Black Sea Maritime Security Center envisioned in the strategy anticipates increasing situational awareness from the sea surface to the seabed and monitoring submarine cables, offshore energy facilities, and other critical infrastructure.[vi]
The implementation report published in July 2026 shows that this approach has begun to institutionalize. The regional security center concept developed by Bulgaria and Romania is planned to be opened to the participation of regional partners such as Turkey, Ukraine, and Moldova.[vii] Here, the importance of the Black Sea does not stem solely from the concentration of military forces. The region is a transit zone where military, economic, and logistical connections intersect among Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In other words, what makes the Black Sea strategic is not only who is there, but where can be reached from there. At this exact point, Spykman’s Rimland approach gains current analytical value.
A similar but more distinct pattern is seen in the Western Pacific. In the US Secretary of Defense’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in May 2025, it was explicitly stated that the forward deployment of American forces in the Western Pacific should be arranged to create deterrence along the “first and second island chains”. In the same speech, it was noted that the US had deployed the NMESIS anti-ship system in the Philippines and moved the system to the Batanes Islands, located on the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. [viii]
This is a highly meaningful geographical alignment when viewed through the language of classical geopolitics. When the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the South China Sea are considered as a whole, a vast land-sea contact zone emerges where the Asian continent opens to the Pacific. The access of China’s continental power to the seas and the access of the US and its regional allies’ sea power to the continent’s coasts confront each other precisely in this geography.
An important development showing that Spykman’s relevance should not be seen merely as a historical analogy is the re-emergence of the same debate in contemporary academic literature. In their study published in the journal International Affairs in 2025, Brendon J. Cannon and Ash Rossiter directly apply Mackinder’s Heartland and Spykman’s Rimland approaches to the contemporary Eurasia and Indo-Pacific competition. The authors argue that China’s economic and logistical position in Central Asia does not only produce continental power but may also impact its power projection capacity towards the seas, and they re-discuss the importance of Rimland states for the balance of power in Eurasia.[ix] This study also brings an important correction to the thesis of Spykman’s return.
Explaining today’s geopolitics solely through the Rimland carries the danger of making a single geographical region overly deterministic, similar to what Mackinder did. Indeed, one of the main arguments of the 2025 International Affairs special issue is that the extreme concentration of Indo-Pacific strategies on the maritime domain can render the increasing importance of Central Asia and continental Eurasia invisible.[x]
Therefore, reading our present day through Spykman does not mean that Mackinder has become entirely invalid. On the contrary, the emerging new picture shows that the relationship between the Heartland and the Rimland has regained importance. When China’s Belt and Road initiatives, the transportation networks passing through Central Asia, the Black Sea connections, and maritime access in the Indo-Pacific are considered together, it is becoming increasingly difficult to strictly separate continental and maritime geopolitics from each other. In the great power competition of the twenty-first century, the issue is not merely controlling a geography, but rather the capacity to provide access, connectivity, and power projection across different geographical areas.
For this reason, the contemporary Rimland is not just a strip of land. It is a multi-layered strategic space where ports, straits, military bases, railways, energy terminals, submarine cables, and logistics corridors are interconnected. This situation does not mean classical geopolitics has been re-validated. Geography is not destiny. Nuclear weapons, long-range precision strike systems, unmanned platforms, space capacity, cyberspace, and global economic networks have created a strategic environment very different from the world in which Spykman lived. But technology has not eliminated geography. On the contrary, technology itself has become increasingly dependent on geographical infrastructure. Digital data passes through submarine cables, energy security is shaped around pipelines and terminals, the strategic value of long-range weapons is linked to the bases where they are deployed, and the impact of naval forces is tied to the ports and passages they can access.
Therefore, the answer to the question “Is Spykman returning?” should not be a simple “yes”. Spykman is not returning. However, the strategic weight of international politics is once again concentrating in the geographical contact areas he highlighted.
Mackinder’s fundamental question was how the land power in the center of Eurasia could be organized. Spykman, on the other hand, moved this question to the periphery of the continent. His fundamental question was from where the power formed in Eurasia would reach the seas, and in which geographies this power would be balanced. The current strategic competition extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and from the Indian Ocean to the island chains of the Western Pacific, makes it necessary to ask this question again eighty years later. Perhaps Spykman’s relevance lies exactly here.
[i] Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History”, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, April 1904, pp. 421-437.
[ii] Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1942.
[iii] Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, ed. Helen R. Nicholl, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1944, p. 43.
[iv] Colin S. Gray, “Nicholas John Spykman, the Balance of Power, and International Order”, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 6, 2015, pp. 873-897, Taylor & Francis, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2015.1018412
[v] “Strengthening NATO’s Eastern Flank”, NATO, https://nato.int/en/what-we-do/deterrence-and-defence/strengthening-natos-eastern-flank?utm_source=chatgpt.com, (Date of Access: 18.09.2026). NATO defines its eastern flank as a line extending from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea; it states that as of June 2026, there are nine multinational forward land forces, and that Baltic Sentry conducts operations aimed at protecting critical submarine infrastructure.
[vi] “The European Union’s Strategic Approach to the Black Sea Region”, European Commission–High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, JOIN(2025) 135 final, 28.05.2025, EUR-Lex, https://shorturl.at/hcMy4, (Date of Access: 18.09.2026).
[vii] “Joint Report to the European Parliament and the Council on the Implementation of the EU Strategic Approach to the Black Sea Region”, European Commission–High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, JOIN(2026) 15 final, 03.07.2026, EUR-Lex, https://shorturl.at/32Po9, (Date of Access: 18.09.2026).
[viii] “Remarks by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore”, U.S. Department of Defense, https://shorturl.at/y4rg3, (Date of Access: 18.09.2026). “The speech explicitly states the forward deployment along the ‘first and second island chains’ in the Western Pacific and the NMESIS deployment in the Batanes Islands.
[ix] Brendon J. Cannon-Ash Rossiter, “Rethinking and Arresting Eurasian Hegemony: The Centrality of Central Asia to Indo-Pacific Strategies”, International Affairs, Vol. 101, No. 4, July 2025, pp. 1193-1212, DOI: 10.1093/ia/iiaf064
[x] Brendon J. Cannon-Li-Chen Sim-Farkhod Aminjonov, “Central Asia and the Indo-Pacific: Bridging the Divide in an Age of Great Power Rivalry”, International Affairs, Vol. 101, No. 4, July 2025, pp. 1177-1191, DOI: 10.1093/ia/iiaf102
