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Defense Primer: Geography, Strategy, and U.S. Force Design (CRS Report for Congress)

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Release Date Revised March 19, 2024
Report Number IF10485
Report Type In Focus
Authors Ronald O'Rourke
Source Agency Congressional Research Service
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Summary:

Most of the world's people, resources, and economic activity are located not in the Western Hemisphere, but in the other hemisphere, particularly Eurasia. In response to this basic feature of world geography, U.S. policymakers for the last several decades have chosen to pursue, as a key element of U.S. national strategy, a goal of preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon in one part of Eurasia or another, on the grounds that such a hegemon could represent a concentration of political, economic, and military power strong enough to threaten vital U.S. interests. The Trump Administration's 2018 national security strategy document states that the United States “will compete with all tools of national power to ensure that regions of the world are not dominated by one power.” Although U.S. policymakers do not often state this goal explicitly in public, U.S. military operations in recent decades both wartime operations and day-to-day operations appear to have been carried out in no small part in support of this goal.