Le trasformazioni dello spazio politico-geografico e la nuova mappa delle minacce e delle opportunità : origini e temi della riflessione geopolitica americana

The article argues that the origins of the contemporary American geopolitical thought go back to the transformation of the political-geographical space which occurred between the end of the Nineteenth century and the beginning of the Twentieth century. The closing of the American frontier, on the one hand, and the widely perceived exhaustion of the international global space (as a result of an array of tendencies such as the proliferation of the interdependences generated by the industrialization, the advancement of the transport/telecommunications technology, the revival of the European colonialism and the «awakening of Asia») on the other hand brought about a renewal of the interest in the complex relation between space and power, politics and geography. The article contends that the American geopolitical discourse both reflected that spatial transformation and undertook the task of assessing its likely consequences for the national security of the United States and the survival of its peculiar way of life. In so doing Geopolitics drew a new global map of the opportunities and the threats to the United States’ fundamental interests and furnished a criterion for identifying America’s friends and foes in the international arena, which in turn influenced the American foreign policy and contributed to the rise and evolution of the American internationalism.