Discourses of danger: Robert Strausz-Hupe, geopolitics and American foreign policy, 1939-1961

In the early 1940s Robert Strausz-Hupé was at the forefront of popularisng the term ‘geopolitics’ and establishing a geopolitical approach to international relations in the United States. Despite this very he is a figure virtually ignored within the field of geography. Using the ‘methods’ of the newly emerging post structuralist inspired field of Critical Geopolitics this thesis seeks to document his life and work in the years 1939 to 1961. In particular it focuses on three principle concerns. 1) It seeks to document and illustrate the important role Strausz-Hupé had in developing geopolitics in the United States. Through discussing his activities in these years it argues that he has been a central, but forgotten figure within the field. 2) Through an analysis of his texts it explicates and critiques his particular notion of geopolitical theory and how this assists in the making of foreign policy as an approach to international relations. 3) It argues that in the period under study he used geopolitical theory to construct first Germany and then the Soviet Union as threats to US national security, and that the construction of these threats were fundamentally important to the United States’ ability move from an isolationist to internationalist foreign policy.