Friends, foes, and the reproduction of U.S. latitudinal geostrategy

This essay proposes the perspective of latitudinal geostrategy as a baseline of spatial orientations against which change and continuity in U.S. geostrategy can be assessed. Latitudinalism is an imaginative geography, envisioning the projection of U.S. power and influence into Eurasia. However, allies, adversaries, and markets build their own geostrategies on expectations of such U.S. spatial behavior. This increases the cost of radical deviations for all sides. Hence, even alternative, longitudinal discourses about the “Western Hemisphere” tend to reproduce latitudinal justifications and interactions. The article traces these spatial orientations in the works of major U.S. geostrategists and their Eurasian challengers—most notably, Carl Schmitt and his Russian successors—through the twentieth century. It then sketches how U.S. latitudinal interactions and discourses in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia provided a baseline of relative continuity in spatial orientations amid the disruptions of President Trump’s second term until early 2026.