¹Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: sdalby@gmail.com

Abstract

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001 American geopolitical categories changed as the world was remapped into categories congruent with the prosecution of the global war on terror. The designation global was linked to the capabilities of the new military technologies of the revolution in military affairs in official documents that codified the Bush doctrine. The official US doctrine now explicitly states that ending tyranny on earth is the national security objective for which these new forces will be used. But a careful reading of the official 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report, and Thomas Barnett's popular exposition of the logic of the war on terror in The Pentagon's New Map shows that both these geographical specification of contemporary geopolitics, and the high-technology forces planned to fight the war, offer little promise that it will be successfully prosecuted. Geopolitics remains much more complicated than either contemporary policy statements or popular cartographic justifications suggest.