Alfred Thayer Mahan
Prophet of Sea Power
A mediocre sailor who hated the sea wrote one book that launched a global naval arms race. Mahan's theory still drives strategy from DC to Beijing.
Thinkers
The strategists and theorists — from Thucydides to Mearsheimer — whose ideas shaped how states understand power.
28 articles
Classical Theorists (pre-WWII)
Halford Mackinder
Father of Geopolitics
In 1904 a British geographer argued whoever controls Central Eurasia controls the world. Mackinder's Heartland Theory invented geopolitics as a discipline.
Hans Morgenthau
Father of Modern Realism
A refugee from Nazi Germany who made power politics into a science. Morgenthau founded modern realism, then wielded it to oppose the Vietnam War.
Henry Kissinger
The Architect of Realpolitik
He opened China, pursued detente, and stands accused of war crimes. Kissinger's century-long career defined realpolitik and its moral contradictions.
Kenneth Waltz
Architect of Structural Realism
Waltz stripped international relations to a single variable: the system's anarchic structure. His neorealism became the theory every rival had to answer.
Nicholas Spykman
Architect of American Grand Strategy
He died in 1943 before seeing the Cold War he predicted. Spykman's Rimland theory flipped Mackinder and became America's containment blueprint.
Sun Tzu
The Master of Strategic Thought
Where Clausewitz saw war as politics by violence, Sun Tzu called violence strategic failure. His Art of War still shapes how China projects power today.
Thucydides
The Father of Political Realism
An exiled Athenian general wrote the first analysis of power politics 2,400 years ago. His Athens-vs-Sparta account still frames how we see US vs. China.
Modern Strategists (post-WWII)
Alexander Dugin
Called 'Putin's brain,' Dugin built a neo-Eurasianist ideology that frames Russia's wars as a civilizational struggle against the liberal Atlantic order.
Anu Bradford
Why does a bloc with no Google, no Amazon, and no TikTok still write the rules those companies live by? Anu Bradford's answer — the Brussels Effect — explained how the European Union turned market access into the most underrated form of power in world politics.
Carl Schmitt
A Nazi collaborator whose ideas neither left nor right can stop using. Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction still defines debates on sovereignty and power.
Carl von Clausewitz
He never won a decisive battle and died before finishing his book. Yet Clausewitz's On War defined how the West thinks about conflict for two centuries.
Chris Miller
A Cold War economic historian who reframed the semiconductor as the strategic commodity of the twenty-first century. Chris Miller's Chip War turned a niche industrial story into the master narrative of US–China competition — and arrived as a strategy memo days before Washington's chip embargo.
Contemporary Geopolitical Thinkers
The classical canon explains the structure of power; these contemporary thinkers explain its newest weapons — networks, chips, data, and regulation.
Francis Fukuyama
He declared liberal democracy the final form of government as the Cold War ended. Three decades of democratic backsliding later, his thesis still provokes.
George Kennan
One telegram from Moscow in 1946 launched America's Cold War strategy. Kennan then spent decades opposing the militarized containment his words inspired.
Graham Allison
He used the Cuban Missile Crisis to expose how governments actually decide, then coined 'Thucydides Trap' — the framework dominating US-China analysis.
Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman
Two political scientists overturned a comforting liberal assumption — that economic interdependence makes the world more peaceful — by showing how the plumbing of globalisation became its most powerful weapon. Their concept now anchors how Washington thinks about sanctions, chips, and the dollar.
John Mearsheimer
He warned that NATO expansion would provoke Russia long before Ukraine. Mearsheimer's offensive realism makes him the most debated IR scholar alive.
Joseph Nye
When everyone declared America in decline, Nye argued they measured the wrong thing. His 'soft power' concept redefined how nations think about influence.
Ketian Zhang
Why did China freeze Norwegian salmon over a Nobel Prize and gut South Korean retailers over a missile-defence radar — yet wave through provocations many times larger? Ketian Zhang's answer overturned the image of a reflexively bullying Beijing: China's coercion is selective, calculated, and surprisingly restrained.
Mark Leonard
Mark Leonard gave a name to the grey zone where states neither make war nor keep peace, but turn the ties between them into weapons. His argument that connectivity itself breeds conflict is the European complement to weaponized interdependence — and the intellectual engine behind Europe's quest for strategic sovereignty.
Nadège Rolland
Most coverage treats China's Belt and Road as ports, railways, and debt. Nadège Rolland — reading Chinese strategic writing in the original — argued it is something far more ambitious: the scaffolding for a Sinocentric order across Eurasia, a sphere of influence laid in concrete and fibre rather than declared outright.
Robert Keohane
Keohane accepted realism's bleak premises, then proved cooperation could emerge from anarchy. His institutionalism became the main rival to power politics.
Rush Doshi
Rush Doshi answered the central question of the era — does China have a plan to displace the United States? — by reading the Communist Party's own documents in the original Mandarin. Then he went to the White House and helped write the American response.
Samuel Huntington
His 'Clash of Civilizations' predicted wars along cultural fault lines, not ideology. Praised as prophetic or condemned as bigotry, it shaped a generation.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Sheena Chestnut Greitens follows a single thread from the secret-police files of Cold War dictatorships to the surveillance exports of contemporary China: how a government organises its internal security shapes the violence it produces at home and the way it projects power abroad.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
A Polish exile who became Carter's national security advisor and mapped Eurasia as the grand chessboard where American primacy would be won or lost.