How did the great powers build their policies on geopolitics? -- And why did Iraq fail?

Geopolitics: before it was a science it was an instinct

The British did not need to read Halford Mackinder to know that control of the seas meant control of trade, and that trade meant power. They did it by instinct first; Mackinder came centuries later to formulate a theory explaining what they had done. This is the great paradox in the history of geopolitics: the great powers did not read it -- they lived it. And the weak powers read it today without daring to practice it.

Geopolitics in its simplest sense is the question of how geographic position interacts with political power. But in its larger applications, it is far more than that: it is the understanding that geography imposes constraints and opens opportunities, and that mature strategic intelligence is the kind that reads both together and builds policy from them.

How the great powers did it

Take the United States as an example. Its position, flanked by two oceans and two weak neighbors, gave it what the American theorist John Mearsheimer called 'the best strategic geography in history.' But Washington did not simply rest on this natural blessing; it built the Monroe Doctrine on it to keep European powers out of the Western Hemisphere, then projected its weight toward the world after World War II, and ultimately achieved a maritime dominance that makes it the only power capable of closing any major shipping lane in the world. Every step was a reflection of a clear reading of geography and what it permits.

American geography made it a naturally secure state, freeing it to shape the world in its own image. Iraq's geography made it sought by everyone, so it became preoccupied with survival instead of crafting a role.

Russia is a different and tragic example. A vast empire with no natural borders to protect it -- no firm mountains, no wide oceans -- so all its Tsarist, Soviet, and Putinist policies revolved around a single obsession: extending strategic depth. Its wars are not random; they are all an expression of deep-rooted geographic anxiety. Hence the expansion toward the Baltic, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Distance is Russia's primary weapon, which is why it always needs more space between itself and its adversary.

China today presents a contemporary model of long-term geopolitical thinking. The Belt and Road Initiative is not ordinary infrastructure projects; it is a strategy to convert what Beijing calls its 'major geopolitical anxiety' -- a potential American naval blockade -- into a card it holds. Building overland routes and alternative seaports across Africa and South Asia is fundamentally a remapping of global economic dependency.

Iraq: ideal geography and disabled policy

Iraq possesses the kind of position that few states have: it combines shared borders with six influential states, a maritime outlet to the Gulf, a location at the heart of the entire Middle East, vast oil wealth, and a civilizational history that grants it a symbolic depth not to be underestimated. This combination, anywhere else in the world, would have made the state that hosts it a regional power impossible to bypass.

So why did that not happen? The simplified answer says Iraq was ruled by tyrants who corrupted it. But this answer strikes at the symptoms and ignores the root. The root is that every system that ruled Iraq -- monarchical, republican, Baathist, or post-2003 -- never treated geography as strategic capital, but treated it as a burden or a source of threat.

Saddam Hussein, for example, managed Iraqi geography with the logic of fear, not investment. His wars with Iran and Kuwait were not expressions of a clear geopolitical vision; they were at best Tsarist expansionism without intellectual depth, and at worst personal whim that plunged the state into successive disasters. He never asked: What do his neighbors truly want? What does he truly want? And how can he make his position an advantage rather than a burden?

States that read their geography well turn their weakness into leverage and their strength into influence. Iraq did the opposite: it turned its geographic strengths into arenas of conflict and its weaknesses into lethal identities.

The lesson not learned

The great powers understood something simple: geography is a tool. It can be used for deterrence, attraction, mediation, or trade. But it cannot be ignored. Every state that tries to act as though it is in a different geography -- or lives by an ideology that disregards its actual location -- will eventually pay the price.

Iraq today is at a crossroads: either its political, academic, and military elites begin thinking seriously about what its geographic position actually means, and how it can be converted into an integrated national project -- or it continues to be a playground in which the roles of others are managed.

Analytical conclusion

Geopolitics is not a science for the powerful alone; it is fundamentally a tool for the weak who wish to transcend their weakness. The great powers did not use it because they were already great -- they became great because they used it. Iraq possesses all the geographic assets that many far more powerful states today lack. The question is not what it has, but who dares to read it seriously and build a real state on that foundation.