Abstract

Territorial geopolitics, often based in metaphors such as the opposition between land-and sea-powers, has long dominated thinking invoking the word «geopolitics». I critique this approach to geopolitics using the historical example of the United States whose «hegemony» has rested, I argue, on a mode of competition with other states that has been neither entirely territorial nor entirely coercive but that has relied on creating and managing global flows of capital and trade that cannot be understood in the terms of «classical» late-nineteenth century geopolitics.