A How‐To Handbook for Hegemons

Have you ever eaten dinner at a Japanese restaurant but on the way home secretly been tempted to grab a burger at a fast food drive-through? No matter how delicious the sushi was, sometimes one is left yearning for... a little something more. That is precisely the feeling one has after reading Jakub Grygiel's generally excellent Great Powers and Geopolitical Change. Despite its short length (only 177 pages, not counting the 49 pages of Notes), Grygiel has aggressive ambitions for this little book. In it, he aspires to do nothing less than (i) review the historical development of geopolitics, (ii) argue for its current relevance to the study and practice of international statecraft, (iii) present three relevant case studies, and (iv) posit some strategic lessons for future United States decision makers. Grygiel succeeds in much of this, and as such Great Powers and Geopolitical Change is a must-read for anyone interested in international relations in general and geopolitics in particular. Nonetheless, partly due to the book's brevity, the reader is still left with a vague hunger for a little more: a little more depth in the policy analysis, a little more breadth in the theoretical scope. At its simplest, geopolitics is the study of the role that geographic factors (very broadly defined) play in the behavior of nations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, geopolitics had formed one of the basic foundations of the traditional realist school of international relations and every self-respecting political scholar was expected to acquire a firm knowledge of geography. In the interwar years, however, German geopoliticians highjacked the field to justify the Nazi regime's policies of military aggression and genocide. As a result, the field of geopolitics fell into a long period of intellectual disdain, reviled by academe for its intellectual and moral ambiguity. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, scholarly interest in geopolitics has enjoyed a substantial revival. The neoconservative clique within the Bush Administration has shown itself to be particularly enamored with the role that geographic factors can play in strategically dominating the post-Cold War environment (Ikenberry 2002). Celebrating this renaissance of interest, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change begins with a history of geopolitics' rollercoaster ride as an academic approach to international relations. Grygiel argues convincingly that the austere econometric models favored by the current generation of number crunching political scientists shortchange our understanding of state behavior. His portrayal of geopolitics is decidedly mainstream, ignoring the full flower of the approach that is so well illustrated in, for instance, The Geopolitics Reader by Gear6id Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge (1998). Nevertheless, the first chapter of Great Powers and Geopolitical Change is a superbly succinct essay that shows the enduring relevance of geopolitics. International relations instructors should consider it as an introductory reading on the subject for both undergraduate and graduate students. Grygiel's second chapter sets out the central thesis of the book: the fairly obvious admonition that states, especially those with imperial ambitions, must