The Revenge of Geography

"Kaplan’s “Revenge of Geography” is a global tour de force that surveys the thought systems of the greatest geopolitical strategists of the past century and extends them to the current day. The first half of the book is a homage to the minds of Mackinder, Mahan, Braudel, Berlin, etc. The second covers the geopolitics of Europe, Russia, China, India, and Turkey. A final short section (feels a bit tacked on) covers America’s relationship with Mexico. Kaplan does a tremendous job tying together geopolitical developments across space and time while keeping a consistent narrative. I found myself saying “Ah, that makes sense now” often - this book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand recent developments in global geopolitics. Kaplan totally predicted the Russia/Ukraine issue (for future reference, Russia just invaded Crimea - March 2014)… back in 2012!<br/><br/>Below are a handful of my favorite quotes. I had a hard time whittling down my notes from this book to a size GoodReads would accept!<br/><br/>##############<br/><br/>Mountains are a conservative force, often protecting within their defiles indigenous cultures against the fierce modernizing ideologies that have too often plagued the flatlands, even as they have provided refuge for Marxist guerrillas and drug cartels in our own era. The Yale anthropologist James C. Scott writes that “hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys.”<br/><br/>Occupying the heart of Europe between the North and Baltic seas and the Alps, the Germans, according to the historian Golo Mann, have always been a dynamic force locked up in a “big prison,” wanting to break out. But with the north and south blocked by water and mountains, outward meant east and west, where there was no geographical impediment. “What has characterized the German nature for a hundred years is its lack of form, its unreliability,” writes Mann, referring to the turbulent period from the 1860s to the 1960s, marked by Otto von Bismarck’s expansion and the two world wars. But the same could also be said for Germany’s size and shape on the map throughout its history.<br/><br/>Indeed, after the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilized territory. The fossa regia remains relevant to the current Middle East crisis. Still visible in places, it runs from Tabarka on Tunisia’s northwestern coast southward, and turns directly eastward to Sfax, another Mediterranean port. The towns beyond that line have fewer Roman remains, and today tend to be poorer and less developed, with historically higher rates of unemployment. The town of Sidi Bouzid, where the Arab revolt started in December 2010, when a vendor of fruit and vegetables set himself on fire as an act of protest, lies just beyond Scipio’s line.<br/><br/>While the roots of realism hark back 2,400 years to Thucydides’ illusion-free insights about human behavior in The Peloponnesian War, modern realism was perhaps most comprehensively summed up in 1948 by Hans J. Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace… Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world “is the result of forces inherent in human nature.” And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos), and honor (doxa). “To improve the world,” writes Morgenthau, “one must work with these forces, not against them.”<br/><br/>Enlarging on this point, simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship. For “the need to marshal popular emotions,” says Morgenthau, “cannot fail to impair the rationality of foreign policy itself.” Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous. “All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe.<br/><br/>“Realism is alien to the American tradition,” Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, once told me. “It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the facade of their values-based rhetoric.”<br/><br/>Geography, he goes on, bridges the gap between arts and sciences, connecting the study of history and culture with environmental factors, which specialists in the humanities sometimes neglect.<br/><br/>What could be a more central fact of European history than that Germany is a continental power and Great Britain an island?<br/><br/>Note how temperate zone, east–west oriented Eurasia is better off than north–south oriented sub-Saharan Africa, because technological diffusion works much better across a common latitude, where climatic conditions are similar, thus allowing for innovations in the tending of plants and the domestication of animals to spread rapidly. It is no accident that the world’s poorest regions tend to be where geography, by way of soil suitability, supports high population densities, but not economic growth—because of distance from ports and railheads. Central India and inland Africa are prime examples of this.<br/><br/>The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty.”<br/><br/>This is all very reminiscent of the pattern described by the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian and geographer Ibn Khaldun, who notes that while luxurious living strengthens the state initially by furthering its legitimacy, in succeeding generations it leads to decadence, with the process of collapse signaled by the rise of powerful provincial leaders, who then invade and form their own dynasties.<br/><br/>History, according to McNeill, is a study in fluidity, in which things only seem secure and neatly geographically ordered: more crucially we are always in a state of smaller transitions and cultural interchanges.<br/><br/>And above all, of course, there is the history of the Jews, which goes against the entire logic of the geographical continuity of major religions (particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism), and which McNeill therefore takes pains to include: the utter destruction of the Jewish community in Judea, the consequence of the crushing of first- and second-century A.D. revolts by the Romans, did not end Judaism, which went on improbably to evolve and flourish in scattered cities of the western Diaspora, a two-thousand-year-old story averse to the dictates of geography, which shows once again how ideas and human agency matter as much as physical terrain.<br/><br/>Europe’s was also a harsh, cold, and wet climate, and as Toynbee, who, like McNeill, was, at a crucial level, not a fatalist, nonetheless writes: “Ease is inimical to civilisation.… The greater the ease of the environment, the weaker the stimulus toward civilisation.”<br/><br/>it is interesting here to note Hodgson’s view that the horse nomadism of the Mongols and Turkic peoples was ultimately more crucial to history than the camel nomadism of the Arabs. Because horses could not endure the aridity of Middle Eastern deserts, and the sheep with which these nomads often traveled required relatively dense forage, the Mongol-led armies avoided distant Arabia, and instead ravaged nearer and more environmentally friendly Eastern Europe, Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia and Iran, Central Asia, India, and China: territories that, taken together, would be of overwhelming strategic importance on the map of Eurasia just prior to the advent of gunpowder warfare. The Mongol-Turkic invasions were arguably the most significant event in world history in the second millennium of the common era, and it was mainly because of the use of certain animals tied to geography.<br/><br/>Mackinder both begins and sums up his thinking with this oft-quoted grand and simplistic dictum: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.<br/><br/>These marginal areas of Eurasia, especially their littorals, was what Spykman called the Rimland. Spykman held that the Rimland was the key to world power; not Mackinder’s Heartland, because in addition to dominating Eurasia, the maritime-oriented Rimland was central to contact with the outside world.<br/><br/>Mahan noted that it is “the limited capacity of navies to extend coercive force inland” that makes them no menace to liberty.<br/><br/>Russia’s “irremediable remoteness from an open sea has helped put it in a disadvantageous position for the accumulation of wealth,” and, as Mahan goes on, “This being so, it is natural and proper that she should be dissatisfied, and dissatisfaction readily takes the form of aggression.”<br/><br/>Geography, rather than a cushion, has become a prison from which there is no escape.<br/><br/>Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability.<br/><br/>Insecurity is the quintessential Russian national emotion. “The desire to find both roots and vindication in history grew partly out of the insecurity of the Eastern Plain,” writes Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in his great tome about Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe. “Geography, not history,” he says, has dominated Russian thinking: Harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of rainfall and soil fertility controlled the lives of the ordinary peasant; and the ebb and flow of nomadic conquerors often seemed little more than the senseless movement of surface objects on an unchanging and unfriendly sea. In other words, the very flatness of Russia, extending from Europe to the Far East, with few natural borders anywhere and the tendency for scattered settlements as opposed to urban concentrations, has for long periods made for a landscape of anarchy, in which every group was permanently insecure… Russia’s religious and communist totality, in other words, harked back to this feeling of defenselessness in the forest close to the steppe, which inculcated in Russians, in turn, the need for conquest.<br/><br/>Yet even Putin has not altogether given up on the European dimension of Russian geography. To the contrary, his concentration on Ukraine as part of a larger effort to re-create a sphere of influence in the near-abroad is proof of his desire to anchor Russia in Europe, albeit on nondemocratic terms. Ukraine is the pivot state that in and of itself transforms Russia. Abutting the Black Sea in the south and former Eastern European satellites to the west, Ukraine’s very independence keeps Russia to a large extent out of Europe. With Greek and Roman Catholics in the western part of Ukraine and Eastern Orthodox in the east, western Ukraine is a breeding ground for Ukrainian nationalism while the east favors closer relations with Russia. In other words, Ukraine’s own religious geography illustrates the country’s role as a borderland between Central and Eastern Europe. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that without Ukraine, Russia can still be an empire, but a “predominantly Asian” one, drawn further into conflicts with Caucasian and Central Asian states. But with Ukraine back under Russian domination, Russia adds 46 million people to its own Western-oriented demography, and suddenly challenges Europe, even as it is integrated into it. In this case, according to Brzezinski, Poland, also coveted by Russia, would become the “geopolitical pivot” determining the fate of Central and Eastern Europe and, therefore, of the European Union itself. The struggle between Russia and Europe, and in particular between Russia and Germany-France, goes on, as it has since the Napoleonic Wars, with the fate of countries like Poland and Romania hanging in the balance.<br/><br/>Kazakhstan is truly becoming an independent power in its own right. It is developing three super-giant “elephant” oil, gas, and condensate fields, two on the Caspian Sea, with major investment from Western multinationals. A new oil pipeline from the Caspian to western China will soon be completed. Kazakhstan is about to become the world’s largest producer of uranium. It has the world’s second largest chromium, lead, and zinc reserves, the third largest manganese reserves, the fifth largest copper reserves, and ranks in the top ten for coal, iron, and gold. Kazakhstan is Mackinder’s Heartland! It is rich in all the world’s strategic natural resources and smack in the middle of Eurasia—overlapping, as it does, western Siberia and Central Asia—and stretches 1,800 miles from the Caspian Sea in the west to Outer Mongolia in the east. <br/><br/>Thus, the building of the Grand Canal between 605 and 611, linking the Yellow and the Yangzi rivers—and China’s famine-prone north with its economically productive south, with its rice surpluses—had, according to British historian John Keay, “a similar effect to the building of the first transcontinental railroads in North America.”<br/><br/>In all of this, China is not risk-averse. Eyeing some of the world’s last untapped deposits of copper, iron, gold, uranium, and precious gems, China is already mining for copper in war-torn Afghanistan, just south of Kabul. China has a vision of Afghanistan (and of Pakistan) as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from Indian Ocean ports, linking up with Beijing’s budding Central Asian dominion-of-sorts. China has been “exceptionally active” building roads that will connect Xinjiang with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Within Afghanistan itself, a Chinese firm, the China Railway Shistiju Group, is “defying insecurity” by building a roadway in Wardak Province. China is improving rail infrastructures that approach Afghanistan from several directions. Thus, as the United States moves to defeat al Qaeda and irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, it is China’s geopolitical position that will be enhanced. Military deployments are ephemeral: roads, rail links, and pipelines can be virtually forever.<br/><br/>China talks about Taiwan in terms of consolidating the national patrimony, unifying China for the good of all ethnic Chinese. America talks about Taiwan in terms of preserving a model democracy. But Taiwan is something else: in Army general Douglas MacArthur’s words, it is “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” that dominates the center point of China’s convex seaboard, from which an outside power like the United States can “radiate” power along China’s coastal periphery, according to Holmes and Yoshihara. As such, nothing irritates Chinese naval planners as much as de facto Taiwanese independence… The Chinese military can focus more intensely on Taiwan than can America’s, given all of America’s global responsibilities. That is why the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan have been particularly devastating news for Taiwan.<br/><br/>Already, Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is the most commanding platform in the world for the projection of U.S. hard power.<br/><br/>Estimates of the number of firearms within Yemen’s borders go as high as eighty million—almost three for every Yemeni. I will never forget what an American military expert told me in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a: “In Yemen you’ve got well over twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hardworking compared with the Saudis next door. It’s the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh.”<br/><br/>It wasn’t so much Charles Martel at Tours in 732 who “brought the Arab war machine to a halt,” but the very foundation of Baghdad, which replaced the dynamism of Bedouin cavalry with that of an imperial and luxurious Persian administration.<br/><br/>A relatively new geopolitical fact that is often overlooked is the Southeast Anatolia Project, whose centerpiece is the Ataturk Dam, twenty-five miles north of Sanliurfa near the Syrian border. Almost two thousand square miles of arable land in the Harran plateau is being irrigated via gravity-flow water diverted from this dam. The whole Euphrates River dam system, planned in the 1970s and built in the 1980s and 1990s, which actually has the capacity to pump water as far as the water-starved West Bank in Palestine, will make Turkey a greater power in the Arab Middle East in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth.<br/><br/>Finally, as the early-twentieth-century foreign correspondent Herbert Adams Gibbons writes, “From Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion of Europe could be conquered.”<br/><br/>The Israeli commando raid in May 2010 against a flotilla of six ships bringing humanitarian supplies from Turkey to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and the ferocious Turkish reaction to that, was the catalyst for announcing to the world Turkey’s historic pivot from West to East.<br/><br/>Braudel, who unlike Mackinder, Spykman, or Mahan lacks a specific theory of geopolitics for us to investigate, nevertheless achieves something greater. For he is more than a geographer or strategist. He is a historian whose narrative has a godlike quality in which every detail of human existence is painted against the canvas of natural forces. If geography ever approaches literature, it does so with Braudel. In a sense, he is a summation of all the strategic thinkers we have encountered thus far.<br/><br/>Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes that perhaps Braudel’s signal contribution to the way in which history is perceived is his concept of “varying wavelengths of time.” At the base is the longue durée: slow, imperceptibly changing geographical time, “of landscapes that enable and constrain.” Above this, at a faster wavelength, come the “medium-term cycles,” what Braudel himself refers to as conjonctures, that is, systemic changes in demographics, economics, agriculture, society, and politics. Cunliffe explains that these are essentially “collective forces, impersonal and usually restricted in time to no more than a century.” Together the longue durée and conjonctures provide the largely hidden “basic structures” against which human life is played out.<br/><br/>But if America can henceforth restrict itself to being an air and sea power, it can easily avoid Venice’s fate. It is the permanence of small wars that can undo us, not the odd, once every third of a century miscalculation, however much tragedy and consternation that causes.<br/><br/>Rome’s real failure in its final phase of grand strategy was that it did not provide a mechanism for a graceful retreat, even as it rotted from within. But it is precisely—and counterintuitively—by planning for such a deft exit from a hegemony of sorts that a state or empire can actually prolong its position of strength. There is nothing healthier for America than to prepare the world for its own obsolescence. That way it labors for a purpose, and not merely to enjoy power for its own sake.<br/><br/>Stanford historian David Kennedy notes, “The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world,” with American GDP nine times that of Mexico.<br/><br/>China is also building a rail system that will link Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan with the Middle Kingdom. A new Silk Road, built on natural resource exploitation, is quietly coming into being in Central Asia that could make China the pivotal Eurasian power of the twenty-first century. Mackinder, the geographer who declared more than a century ago that control of the Eurasian heartland meant control of the world, will remain crucially relevant deep into the twenty-first century. Perhaps the only development that could undermine this scenario is a profound political and economic crisis inside China itself.<br/>"