Geopolitical sacrifice zones in US strategic thought: erasure, the frontier and the Blue Pacific

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Bridging the critical concepts of the spatial frontier and sacrifice zones with strategic thought, this article argues that Washington’s recent geopolitical ‘rediscovery’ of the Pacific primarily represents an imagining of the Blue Pacific as a new frontier for geopolitical competition; a site toward which its military strategy can redirect adversary violence. Unconsciously erasing actually existing social and political structures across the region is a condition of possibility for exclusionary strategies based on a prejudicial rationality that, ironically, risks heightening regional and US insecurity. This insight corrects a common category error claiming that the US goal in the Pacific is ‘strategic denial’ when it is more precisely described as control in the name of strategic denial. The risk that entire Pacific nations become zones for extraction or wartime sacrifice increases when policymakers imagine it as a blank canvas for a ‘great game’.