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Iran has tightened its grip on an age-old trade route, once used to transport silk, spices, and Arabian horses, to choke off oil to much of the world and put pressure on the Trump administration. More than 2,000 miles from Iran’s coast, a remote island in the Indian Ocean with a population of roughly 4,000 people has become central to America’s global competition with China.

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The message is clear: geopolitics has returned. Indeed, it never left. And it has often been determinative. 

Technology changes. Culture shifts. But in many ways, geography is destiny. The fate of nations has both risen and fallen by dint of where certain things — key waterways, resources, borderlands, and trade routes — can be found on a map. 

To 21st century minds unaccustomed to inherent limits, this sort of thinking might be hard to grasp. Policy debates over the last hundred or so years have often been centered on “isms”: communism, capitalism, internationalism, isolationism, neoconservatism, Wilsonianism, and everything in between. But these are creations of the modern era. By contrast, geopolitics seems to belong to another age. 

But what might strike some as archaic has long been a feature of both war and peace. It is enduring. But it is often forgotten, or at best, minimized. However, this hasn’t always been the case.

More than a century ago, foreign policy debates were centered less on high-minded ideals and ivory tower arguments and more on geographic facts.

Perhaps the most famous, and arguably the most influential of its exponents, was America’s Alfred Thayer Mahan. A U.S. Naval officer and professor, Mahan spent years thinking about geography and war. Mahan went on to coin the term “Middle East” to describe........

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