Though he did some work of a “normal science” type and in state-level geopolitics, he is best known, as a theoretical geopolitician, for his part in the system-level grand-theoretical debate over Mackinder’s Heartland doctrine, to which he counter-posed his own Rimland idea, which remains theoretically signifi-cant. His attempt to link geopolitics on the one hand to liberal-idealistic values of individual freedom, national independence, national liberation and anti-imperialism, and on the other hand to political-realist assumptions of the permanence and inevitability of struggles for power, have had a significant influence on the ideological bases of American foreign policy since 1941, of a durability not widely recognized. Nicholas John Spykman, Dutch-American journalist, sociologist, political scientist and geopolitician, was chief among the diffusers of geopolitics from Europe to America.
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