Anyone who has studied the concept of political geography since the Swedish thinker Rudolf Kjellén coined the term and expounded it, describing states as living organisms that grow and expand, knows why place has been put to use in conflict, and knows that the keys to the puzzle lie in strategic locations- among them waterways- and in natural resources: gas, oil, gold, and minerals. And although geography is fixed and politics changes, today's world has inverted the equation of place and politics.
Geography today is the engine of the world's conflicts, and it is deployed politically. Politics changes as place changes. The American president, Donald Trump, moves from Canada and Greenland to the Strait of Hormuz, trying to draw a new geography for the world.
After Trump posted an image of the Strait of Hormuz captioned "new American land," suggesting the strait would come under United States control, some counted this a joke from a president who mixes the serious and the facetious in many of his posts. Others, however, stopped at it and read it through the concept of political geography- geopolitics- holding that such statements cannot be brushed aside as unrealistic, particularly since the area of the strait is in a state of acute tension amid a recent war that has not yet been laid to rest.
The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. It is not Iranian. Nor is it an American waterway, since seas and oceans separate it from America.
Trump's demands to annex the Strait of Hormuz and make it American land come after a series of earlier demands deploying the same equation of changing political geography, among them the demands to annex Greenland and Canada. These are not new calls; they go back to the first centuries of the United States' founding and the attempt to seize the province of Quebec as the first military campaign of the American Revolutionary War, after a series of wars between Canada and the United States across history drew the present borders between them. The War of 1812 secured Canada's remaining independent of the United States, though Upper and Lower Canada were united in 1840 under the name the Province of Canada. Ninety percent of Canada's population lives within the green belt along the border with the United States.
Trump argues that if Canada merged with the United States there would be no tariffs, taxes would fall sharply, and Canada would be entirely secure from the threat of the Russian and Chinese ships that constantly surround it.
Calls to annex Canada, or even Denmark's Greenland, or the Panama Canal, are without precedent in political usage, though Trump has called for a referendum in Canada on becoming the fifty-first American state, saying that together they would form a great nation.
Some may find the attempt to annex Greenland or the Panama Canal comprehensible, given their geopolitical position and its bearing on American national security, while rejecting the idea of purchasing the island or the canal- and despite President Trump's pretext that this is for purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, and that the United States feels ownership and control of Greenland to be an absolute necessity.
The declared argument for annexing or buying Greenland appears realistic in logistical, military, and security terms, as does the case of the Panama Canal. But the attempt to annex the Strait of Hormuz, and a country the size of Canada, remains impossible to explain in any realistic or acceptable way in today's world.
Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations states that territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army, and that the occupation extends only to territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.
It is true that states, their geography, and their borders change. Entities may disappear, as the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav federation disappeared and as Sudan was divided; entities may unite, as Yemen and Germany did; and new states may appear. But none of this can justify any kind of occupation of the territory of others.
The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. It is not Iranian, however Iran tries to color it as such and annex it to Iranian geography, in plain contravention of natural and even political geography. Nor is it an American waterway, and seas and oceans separate it from America.
The solution, then, for all the belligerents in the Strait of Hormuz and around it is to sit down and negotiate. War, in all its conditions, has shown not to end a political crisis.
