High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Nicholas John Spykman (1893 – 1943) was a Dutch-American geostrategist, known as the "godfather of containment." As a political scientist he was one of the founders of the classical realist school in American foreign policy, transmitting Eastern European political thought into the United States. A Sterling Professor of International Relations, teaching as part of the Institute for International Studies at Yale University, one of his prime concerns was making his students geographically literate—geopolitics was impossible without geographic understanding. He was married to the children`s novelist E. C. Spykman. He died of cancer at the age of 49.