Geography, resources and long-run national position.
11 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Monroe Doctrine
James Monroe · 1823
Declares the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonisation and warns that the United States will treat any European attempt to extend…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Long Telegram / The Sources of Soviet Conduct
George F. Kennan · 1947
Diagnoses Soviet behaviour as driven by internal insecurity and prescribes patient containment rather than confrontation.
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Geographical Pivot of History
Halford Mackinder · 1904
Control of the Eurasian 'heartland', now reachable by rail rather than only by sea, will determine world power in the coming era, ending the…
+4 more at this level
12 works
James Monroe
Declares the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonisation and warns that the United States will treat any European attempt to extend its political system there as an unfriendly act.
link checked 17 Sept 2026U.S. Energy Information Administration
Catalogues and quantifies the narrow maritime passages — Hormuz, Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb — through which the bulk of the world's seaborne oil moves, and the concentrated risk this creates.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Congressional Research Service
Sanctions have become the default US foreign-policy tool short of war, and their success depends less on the pain they inflict than on whether the target has a real way to comply without losing face or power.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George F. Kennan
Diagnoses Soviet behaviour as driven by internal insecurity and prescribes patient containment rather than confrontation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael L. Ross
Surveys why states rich in oil and mineral wealth tend toward slower growth, more corruption and higher conflict risk, and weighs the competing causal mechanisms proposed for the 'resource curse'.
Ronald O'Rourke
Argues US defence planning shifted around 2014-2018 from a post-Cold-War focus on counterterrorism and stability operations back to preparing for potential great-power conflict with China and Russia, and traces what that shift requires of force structure and budgets.
link checked 17 Sept 2026U.S. Department of Defense
Sets out current U.S. nuclear declaratory policy, force structure and the strategic logic of deterring Russia and China simultaneously for the first time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Halford Mackinder
Control of the Eurasian 'heartland', now reachable by rail rather than only by sea, will determine world power in the coming era, ending the centuries-long advantage of seafaring peripheral states.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Julian Corbett
Naval power exists to control maritime communication for the sake of what happens on land, so a navy should be judged by its effect on a war's outcome rather than by decisive fleet battle for its own sake.
about 7 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Nicholas J. Spykman
Argues that the coastal 'Rimland' ringing Eurasia, not Mackinder's interior Heartland, is the true prize of great-power competition and the zone the United States must never let a single power dominate.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Albert Wohlstetter
Nuclear deterrence is not automatic but a fragile, expensive achievement that requires a survivable second-strike force, against the then-common assumption that mutual possession of the bomb makes war impossible by itself.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026J. Boone Bartholomees Jr. (ed.)
A working textbook for how the United States actually formulates grand strategy, walking through the theory, the institutions and the recurring failure modes of matching means to ends.
link checked 17 Sept 2026