Robert Strausz-Hupé

Robert Strausz-Hupé (March 25, 1903 – February 24, 2002) was an Austrian-born U.S. diplomat and geopolitical theorist.

Life and career

Born in 1903 in Austria, Strausz-Hupé immigrated to the United States in 1923. Serving as an advisor on foreign investment to American financial institutions, he watched the Depression spread political misery across the America and Europe. After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, Strausz-Hupé began writing and lecturing to American audiences on "the coming war." After one such lecture in Philadelphia, he was invited to give a talk at the University of Pennsylvania, an event which led to his taking a position on the faculty there in 1940. He became an Associate Professor in 1946.^[1]

Strausz-Hupé founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, which later became independent in 1970. In 1957, the Institute published the first issue of Orbis, the quarterly journal that remains to this day the institute’s flagship publication. Strausz-Hupé authored or co-authored several important books on international affairs.

Strausz-Hupé was a foreign policy advisor to Barry Goldwater when Goldwater was the Republican Party's candidate for President of the United States in 1964, and also advised Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign for President. Nixon appointed Strausz-Hupé to be U.S. Ambassador to Morocco in 1969, but the appointment was blocked by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, on the grounds that Strausz-Hupé was too much of a hard-liner in regards to Communism.^[1] Despite this, the following year he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands, and subsequently served as ambassador to Belgium (1972–74), Sweden (1974–76), NATO (1976–77), and Turkey (1981–89).^[2]

In 1989, upon retirement after eight years as Ambassador to Turkey, Strausz-Hupé rejoined the Foreign Policy Research Institute as Distinguished Diplomat-in-Residence and President Emeritus.

Strausz-Hupé died at home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania on February 24, 2002, at the age of 98.^[1]

Quotations

• "As policy evolves towards several continental systems, and technology accentuates the strategic importance of large, contiguous areas. Thus the era of overseas empires and free world trade closes. If this reasoning is pushed to its absolute conclusion, the national state is also a thing of the past, and the future belongs to the giant state. Many nations will be locked in a few vast compartments. But in each of these one people, controlling a strategic area, will be master of the others." – Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (1942)

Works

• Axis America: Hitler Plans Our Future (1941)
• Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (1942)
• The Balance of Tomorrow: Power and Foreign Policy in the United States (1945)
• International Relations (1950)
• The Zone of Indifference (1952)
• The Estrangement of Western Man (1953)
• A Forward Strategy for America (1955)
• Power and Community (1956)
• (co-editor) The Idea of Colonialism (1958)
• Protracted Conflict (1959)
• (with others) Building the Atlantic World (1963)
• In My Time: An Eclectic Autobiography (1965)
• Strategy and Values: Selected Writings of Robert Strausz-Hupé (1973)
• Democracy and American Foreign Policy: Reflections on the Legacy of Alexis de Tocqueville (1995)

References

Notes

Further reading

• Kaplan, Robert D. (2012) The Revenge of Geography: What the Maps Tell Us About the Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate New York: Random House. ISBN978-1-4000-6983-5

External links

• The Political Graveyard