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6229758 
Journal Article 
Intellectuals, institutions and ideology: the case of Robert Strausz-Hupé and ‘American geopolitics’ 
Crampton, A; Tuathail, GÓ 
1996 
Elsevier 
15 
6 
533-555 
Robert Strausz-Hupé is a somewhat forgotten and unexamined figure in the history of ‘American geopolitics’. In the early 1940s Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian émigré to the United States, was one of a number of intellectuals who introduced ‘geopolitics’ to the American public and championed a ‘geopolitical approach’ to international politics in his work for the US government during the Second World War. With the help of funding from American conservatives in the 1950s, Strausz-Hupé established the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and its influential journal Orbis. Together with a number of others, Strausz-Hupé produced a remarkable number of books and articles on the ‘Soviet threat’ to the USA and the western world. The influence of Strausz-Hupé and the FPRI extended into the US military, where its form of anti-communist indoctrination was challenged by Senator William Fulbright in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Strausz-Hupé served as US ambassador for the Nixon and Ford administrations and as a member of the revitalized Committee on the Present Danger. With Ronald Reagan's ascent to power, he once again became a US ambassador, this time to Turkey. From the early 1940s to the mid-1980s, Strausz-Hupé made a career in the analysis but also production of geopolitics as propaganda. The circumstances of his biography are a fascinating window into the intellectuals, institutions and ideology of a dominant strain of ‘American geopolitics’.