Tabloid Imperialism: American Geopolitical Anxieties and the War on Terror

Over the past decade, influential American intellectuals of statecraft have adopted a style of presentation of global political, social, and economic realities that can be described as tabloid geopolitics. Using a discursive style directly borrowed from popular television talk‐shows, news reporting, and punditry, tabloid geopolitics is designed to be highly entertaining, sensational, shocking, and overtly simplistic. Tabloid geopolitics combines commonsensical textual explanations and spectacular maps to produce a sense of fear and inevitable danger that can lead American audiences to accept certain ‘truths’ that geopolitical experts seek to impose. This article traces the path of these discourses of popular geopolitics from ‘tabloid realism’ to ‘tabloid imperialism’. After offering an overview of the tabloid geopolitical genre that takes the reader through the tabloid productions of Robert D. Kaplan, Samuel Huntington, and Thomas Barnett, this essay explores the place of tabloid imperialism today, some 6 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Introducing a recent text by media pundit Tony Blankley, this article shows how previous tabloid realist and tabloid imperialist concerns have given way to a mode of panic tabloid imperialism. Mixing prior tabloid realist and imperialist themes and techniques at a time when uncertainties about the protracted military occupation of Iraq is starting to turn the American public away from the war on terror, Blankley's panic tabloid imperialist text is a somewhat desperate yet, like most tabloid geopolitical discourses, typically hateful, violent and, in the end, self‐defeating attempt at making sense of the place of the West and the United States in the war on terror.