War Beyond Geostrategy

Austin Bay on Apr 16, 2025

Our murky, blood-soaked moment in time demands a new look at geopolitics -- specifically, what constitutes a strategically valuable position that in human terms is worth expending immense wealth and/or using violence to obtain or deny.

Understand the violence option means risking soldier sons' and daughters' lives in the struggle. Post-Hiroshima, obtaining or denying the valuable position risks escalation to nuclear devastation.

The key but undefined concept is "valuable position." More on that in a moment.

As I write this column, the world once again confronts a nuclear fracas involving Ayatollah Iran. Iran's regime is waging somewhere between eight and 12 wars against enemies near and far. The ayatollahs want nuclear weapons because Allah and money and prestige.

For the same reasons, Iran has waged terrorist and proxy war on Israel and the U.S. since roughly 1985. Iran calls Israel a one bomb state, so Israel says no way to Iranian nukes. The U.S. -- lead by Art of the Deal Donald Trump -- says Iran cannot have nuclear weapons because its regime is insane ... BUT maybe individual ayatollahs would rather live than die from massive American and Israeli air and missile attacks directed at their nukes.

The curious website thetoptens.com rates Iran as the eighth most strategic country (a big position?) on Earth because it controls the Strait of Hormuz (oil tanker route from the Persian Gulf) and has ports on the Indian Ocean that make it the "Golden Gate" to landlocked Central Asia.

Iran has its nuclear weapons facilities deeply buried in its vast central plateau that is tough to attack. However, the U.S. has air bases and aircraft carriers and missiles that can strike Iranian targets.

A key base is on the island of Diego Garcia. In early February, I wrote a column titled "Diego Garcia: The American Nowhere Vexing China And Iran."

Diego Garcia's valuable because Location Location Location. The island hosts a U.S. strategic airbase (meaning it easily handles heavy bombers and tankers that can refuel all aircraft), a naval base (that can re-arm nuclear subs and guided missile destroyers) and a fairly well-protected anchorage.

The Pentagon has been sending satellite photos worldwide showing six B-2 bombers on the Diego Garcia runway, as well as a dozen B-1 bombers. Information Warfare? You bet.

Diego Garcia, like Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, like the island of Singapore on the strait connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans, is a definitely strategically valuable geographic position.

But the words are a bit archaic. Geo: the primary definition is "a prefix derived from the Greek word for 'earth'." Geography: Webster's and Britannica agree it's the "study of the lands, features, demography (people, populations), and other phenomena of Earth."

Strategy: from the Greek word for army general, the "strategos" leading the phalanx. My definition: the quasi-science and dicey art of using a nation's or tribe's or cartel's or insurgent sect's various elements of power to try to execute plans to achieve desired goals. These efforts may occur during war or -- most likely -- during the usual dangerous and murky episodes when the bloodshed is minimized and most folks decide to call it peace.

Put the Greek-root words together and you get geostrategy. Wikipedia's definition is nation-state and military biased: "a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning." The U.S. Army War College 2004 Guide to Strategy has this pithier definition: Geostrategy is the intersection of geography and capability, and especially military power.

Human survival interests, however, have escaped Earth's surface and sea geography.

Are the moon and the asteroid belt geostrategic positions, in terms of human struggles expressed in military operations and diplomatic ventures? You bet they are. Within three decades, we will mine mineral-rich asteroids. Control of mini-planets could lead to war in space.

As for cyberspace, the digital other world of communications, data storage and data theft? Cyberspace exists in fiber optic lines, computers, microwave transmissions, cellphones.

International and criminal adversaries constantly attack cyberspace. On April 15, Gatestone reported: "Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) cyber-attacks against America have undergone a deadly shift that seriously threatens the US's capability to prevail in any open conflict with China ... the stealthy insertion of potentially debilitating malware into the computer systems that control critical nodes of US infrastructure" threatens a "Pearl Harbor-magnitude attack on America."

The valuable cyber world is a difficult world to protect. We've moved from Geo to Neo-strategy.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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