on risk™ and geopolitics
Hasbro’s RISK™, the game of world domination
Fellow Readers,
In this first newsletter of 2025, I look forward to sharing details about three thrillers based on modern geopolitics that I will release later this year. As of last week, they’re all available for preorder!
But first, let me offer a perspective on geopolitics, the root theme of these novels, and a topic that is very much on our minds in this year of shifting global alliances.
I’m sure you remember the Hasbro game RISK™, which the company describes on its website as a game of “global domination.” To attract participants, RISK entices prospective players with the simple question: “Who doesn’t want to rule the world?” A French film director created Risk in 1957 under the title Le Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World). It immediately took off, changing corporate ownership twice and exploding in the U.S.
The game endures today as a cultural icon. It was even the foundation of a Seinfeld episode. (George: What’s that? Jerry: Risk, a game of world domination played by two guys who can barely run their own lives). And here’s a fun fact: RISK is accurately based on the academic theories of a revered twentieth-century geopolitical thinker, Halford Mackinder.
Halford Mackinder was a member of parliament in the U.K., a professor at Oxford, and later the founder of the London School of Economics. In 1904, he wrote The Geographic Pivot of History, which is widely regarded as the foundational document of the field of geopolitical study.
In that seminal 1904 work, Mackinder defined geopolitics as an effort to comprehend human history and international relations through the lens of geography. (Notably, his theory was first presented as a paper to the Royal Geographic Society.) He argued that power among countries is not distributed evenly; rather, it emanates from the geographical hand a nation is dealt. Those geographical hands determine global political destinies.
As Americans, we can relate to this intuitively. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain. America! America! God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
In Mackinder terms, those lyrics represent a spike of the geopolitical football. They could be roughly translated as: “Hey, world: We Americans are enormously powerful because the geographic hand we’ve been dealt is a royal straight flush. We have a temperate climate, millions of square miles of arable land, vast forests of timber, and two oceans on our flanks to keep your navies from reaching us. Provoke us at your peril.”
Through geographic advantage, Mackinder analyzed how nations would accumulate power through various combinations of offensive and defensive alliances. The most influential geopolitical actors—whether individual nations or coalitions—would confront one another in “pivot areas.” At that time, he identified Eastern Europe and Western Russia as the world’s largest pivot areas. He theorized that the nations or coalitions that secured these areas would then compete for additional resources in Africa and South America.
You have to hand it to the man. Here we are, 120 years after he made that point, watching the world pivot around Ukraine and Russia—with implications for the balance of power among the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Russia. Blocs of nations are forming or reforming. NATO is under pressure. Countries are actively consolidating geographic resources, competing for access to rare earth minerals, fossil fuels, and sea lanes.
All of which is to say that there is much to think about if you write geopolitical thrillers.
In my bestselling Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr. novel, Shadow State (released May 2024), I dramatized America’s reliance on the refinement of Chinese rare earth minerals. In my next three books to be released later this year- Line of Demarcation, Terminal Velocity, and Red Tide- I explore geopolitical power struggles related to (respectively) Russian control of natural resources in South America, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia, and the U.S. Navy’s tenuous grip on world sea lanes. A brief description of each novel is below the fold—I sincerely hope you will consider preordering them.
I further hope that when you dive into these stories, you’ll think of the game of RISK and that classic geopolitical thinker, Halford Mackinder. Maybe you’ll even dust off that old board game in your closet and teach your kids a thing or two about global conquest.
Tom Clancy LINE OF DEMARCATION by M.P. Woodward (release date, May 20, 2025 from G.P. Putnam & Sons). The sinking of a Coast Guard vessel off Venezuela sparks a covert clash with the Russian Wagner group.
Tom Clancy TERMINAL VELOCITY by M.P. Woodward (release date, September 2, 2025 from G.P. Putnam & Sons). American operatives who participated in the elimination of a global terror network in the 2010s are turning up dead, murdered in their homes throughout the U.S. When the U.S. launches a strike team to Central Asia to track down the killers, they uncover major geopolitical forces at play.
RED TIDE –A Novel of the Coming Pacific War (release date, Fall 2025 from the Naval Institute Press). When the U.S. flexes its muscles in a trade war with China, the PRC responds with devastating force, plunging the global economy into crisis and shifting the power balance of the Pacific.
