Robert Strausz-Hupé

Robert Strausz-Hupé
United States Ambassador to Turkey
In office July 27, 1981 – May 18, 1989
President	Ronald Reagan George H. W. Bush
Preceded by	James W. Spain
Succeeded by	Morton I. Abramowitz
United States Ambassador to NATO
In office March 3, 1976 – April 20, 1977
President	Gerald Ford Jimmy Carter
Preceded by	David K. E. Bruce
Succeeded by	William Tapley Bennett Jr.
United States Ambassador to Sweden
In office April 25, 1974 – March 3, 1976
President	Gerald Ford
Preceded by	Arthur J. Olsen
Succeeded by	David S. Smith
United States Ambassador to Belgium
In office February 15, 1972 – May 22, 1974
President	Richard Nixon
Preceded by	John S. D. Eisenhower
Succeeded by	Leonard Firestone
United States Ambassador to Sri Lanka and Maldives
In office May 3, 1970 – December 12, 1971
President	Richard Nixon
Preceded by	Andrew V. Corry
Succeeded by	Christopher Van Hollen
Personal details
Born	(1903-03-25)March 25, 1903 Vienna, Austria
Died	February 24, 2002(2002-02-24) (aged 98) Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Eleanor Cuyler ​ ​ (m. 1939; died 1976)​ Mayrose Ferreira Nugara ​ ​ (m. 1979)​
Profession	Diplomat, geopolitical theorist

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.

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. As president, Nixon appointed Strausz-Hupé to be 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 strongly against communism. 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).

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.

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)
• (with others) Protracted Conflict: A Forward Strategy for America (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. ISBN 978-1-4000-6983-5

External links

• The Political Graveyard