When the Cold War ended, some foreign policy analysts suggested that geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics as the central theater in global competition. After having dominated for generations, the ideas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century strategists such as Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman could be regarded as obsolete. Globalization and the information revolution, it was said, rendered geography and military hard power less important. Great-power kinetic conflict was a thing of the past, according to some analysts. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that great-power ideological conflict was over, with Francis Fukuyama famously speculating about the arrival of a quasi-Hegelian “end of history.” China’s shift from communism to state capitalism towards the end of the Cold War and ensuing remarkable economic growth seemed to confirm that economic globalization was an irresistible, revolutionary force that would render great-power conflict a thing of the past. Despite the horrors of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Western political and business leaders perceived this to be just an aberration on an otherwise inevitably liberal trajectory for China.

Those analysts were right to note the importance of globalization and geoeconomics, but wrong to downgrade the importance of geopolitics. The current conflict with Iran has revealed once again the geoeconomic underpinnings of global geopolitics. As Sinatra crooned in “Love and Marriage”—you can’t have one without the other. The two concepts are inextricably linked. 

Iran and the Gulf Arab states understand the importance of geoeconomics to geopolitics. The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz represent a strategic chokepoint through which twenty percent of the world’s oil flows. When that flow is interrupted, the economies of some very important countries—in Asia and in Europe—are directly negatively affected, and even oil exporters like the United States and Russia are indirectly affected because of the globalized oil market. Another combination of key waterways and strategic chokepoints is the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea), which connect the Mediterranean Sea with the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean, and ultimately East Asia and the western Pacific Ocean. The global mayhem wrought by the Houthis in the Bab el-Mandeb beginning in late 2023 attests to this.

In his important book Monsoon, Robert Kaplan made the case for the Indian Ocean as the globe’s geopolitical pivot given the economic and military rise of China and India in the 21^st century. Kaplan helped popularize the geographical idea of the “Indo-Pacific,” but the term was popularized in the 1920s by German geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer, who urged the expansion of Germany’s influence to what he predicted would become a vital maritime region.

Judging by its actions even before the Iran War, the Trump administration recognizes the salience of geoeconomic factors for geopolitics. Trump’s tariffs, his deal with Panama over control of the Canal, his energy, industrial, and technology policies, the intervention in Venezuela, his insistence on maintaining access to Diego Garcia in the center of the Indian Ocean, his recent trade and defense cooperation agreements with Indonesia, the War Department’s request for $65.8 billion for shipbuilding, and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz during the current conflict with Iran are all geoeconomic moves on the global chessboard. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent specifically identifies his approach to economic statecraft with that of Alexander Hamilton, understands economic security to be an essential component of national security. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, likewise, believe that geoeconomic maneuvering combined with increased military capabilities is the best recipe for stability and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. 

When Britannia ruled the waves, there were sound geoeconomic reasons for its occupation or control of positions at Gibraltar, Suez, Aden, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Cape of Good Hope, and elsewhere. Those chokepoints provided security for British trade and placed Britain in positions to interrupt the trade of other nations. War for a maritime power like Great Britain always included economic warfare. The United States after the Second World War gradually took over Britain’s role as the world’s preeminent maritime power. The geopolitical strategist James Burnham in the early years of World War II accurately predicted that the United States would become the “receiver” of the British Empire after the war. 

That brings us to the most important strategic chokepoint on today’s global chessboard—the first island chain opposite China in the western Pacific, which encloses the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea. Its importance during the Cold War was recognized by World War II strategists like Nicholas Spykman, who called the waterway between the islands and China the “Asiatic Mediterranean,” Cold War strategists like Burnham who wrote that America’s western security frontier “runs from the Aleutians down the Japanese islands, the Ryukyus . . . to the Philippines,” and military leaders like Gen. Douglas MacArthur who told Congress that America’s strategic frontier “embrace[d] the entire Pacific Ocean” which we can control by “a chain of islands extending in an arc from the Aleutians to the Marianas” using “sea and air power . . . to prevent any hostile movement into the Pacific.” MacArthur added that the “holding of this littoral defense line in the western Pacific is entirely dependent upon holding all segments thereof,” including Taiwan. 

In 1957, Georgetown’s strategic geographer Hans Weigert and George Washington University’s Eric Fischer contributed a chapter in a little-remembered book titled Principles of Political Geography, in which they included a map depicting the series of island chains that form a geopolitical cordon sanitaire along China’s lengthy East Asian coastal region, stretching from Japan and South Korea to the Ryukyus, Taiwan and the Philippines, to Borneo and Indonesia. It is a map of the so-called first island chain that Spykman, Burnham, and MacArthur identified as the keys to containment in the western Pacific, and that in 2026 Secretary Hegseth, Under Secretary Colby, and the Navy’s Pacific Commander Adm. Samuel Paparo say are the keys to denying China’s western Pacific geopolitical ambitions. 

Successfully denying and deterring China’s western Pacific geopolitical ambitions will require a combined military, diplomatic and geoeconomic approach because China, too, understands the importance of geoeconomics to geopolitics, and will wield every tool in its own arsenal to achieve its geopolitical goals. But China also has geoeconomic vulnerabilities to be exploited. China relies on energy supplies from the Middle East that pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and those supplies and much of its trade with the outside world must traverse the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca before reaching China’s ports. Chinese leaders openly refer to this as their Malacca Dilemma, and it behooves the United States and its allies to take whatever diplomatic, military, and geoeconomic measures that will serve to enhance that vulnerability. The goal of strengthening this geoeconomic weapon is not to economically cripple China, but to make it clear to Chinese leaders that if they choose military aggression to achieve their goals in the western Pacific, the United States and its allies in the region have the capabilities—military and economic—to effectively resist that aggression.  

Christians of varying backgrounds have long expressed a desire for the United States to ‘play nice’ with China and the Chinese Communist Party, feeling ambivalent at best about American efforts to shore up its own strategic position against the CCP. This discomfort with utilizing the levers of power at America’s disposal is, on some level, understandable for adherents to a religion which preaches the dignity of the downtrodden and recognizes all empires as having feet of clay. At the same time, it would be a dereliction of duty for American and Western leaders to not recognize the consistent pattern since the Cold War’s end of the CCP portraying itself as a responsible actor in the rules-based order while simultaneously aggressively working to undermine that rules-based order. The truth is that the events in Tiananmen in 1989 were not a blip but entirely in keeping with the CCP’s quest to advance itself through all forms of violence and evil. If the United States does not pursue a geoeconomic edge against China, we may soon find ourselves outmatched, having to explain to the next generation how it is that the CCP came to rule the world.