Geopolitics In College

We must . . . make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe till this is done.

U.S. colleges waited 125 years before they took Thomas Jefferson's advice: > Princeton next month will launch courses in Political & Military Geography and Military History & American Defense Problems, dealing not only with the war but with the peace to come. > Dartmouth has a new course for upperclassmen in Modern War Strategy & National Policy. > Published this month is a course of study--War and National Policy (Farrar & Rinehart)--soon to be used in many colleges. Written by historians at Columbia and the Institute for Advanced Study, it has already been adopted by Princeton and Dartmouth, is under consideration by Columbia, Rutgers, University of California.

This collegiate ground-breaking is due in no small part to an eleven-year campaign by a bronzed, lean artilleryman at West Point. He is Colonel Herman Beukema, 50, Michigan-born son of a smalltown newspaperman. A West Point graduate ('15), he was stationed in Germany for six months after World War I, there met three brilliant young German officers whose sensational theories about total war launched him on a career as student of geopolitics. Today Colonel Beukema declares that history will rate Karl Haushofer, prophet of German geopolitics, more important than Adolf Hitler, because Haushofer's studies made possible Hitler's victories both in power politics and in war.

In 1930 Colonel Beukema started a course at West Point called The Resources for War of the Great Powers. Because there were few English textbooks on his subject, he wrote his own.* His basic texts: The Great Powers in World Politics, by Frank Simonds and Brooks Emeny; The Economics of War, by Horst Mendershausen.

Disturbed by lack of military scholarship in U.S. colleges (until recently the keenest analyses of U.S. military history were written not by Americans but by Europeans), Beukema expounded his ideas to sympathetic civilian educators. Notable among these was Professor Edward Mead Earle, who two years ago started a seminar in U.S. military policy for top-flight scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study (in Princeton, N.J.).

Colonel Beukema's course at West Point is packed with facts about strategic raw materials, Latin America, productive capacity, the efficiency of each great power's form of government for conducting war. He also concerns himself with studies unusual for a soldier--planning the peace to follow the war. Typical question to his students: "With respect to the Far East, what alignment of powers in your opinion would insure peace in that area?"

Elated that the U.S. had at last begun its geopolitical education, Colonel Beukema last week cautioned collegiate geopoliticians not to be too academic. "Most of our planning up to now," said he, "has been too damn long-range."

* The Governments of the Major Foreign Powers, Notes on Latin America.

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