The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Who can do what to
whom?
5
“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.”
Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important
only after the former has been established. In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian
dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.

---

And because world government will forever remain elusive, since there will
never be fundamental agreement on the ways of social betterment, the world is
fated to be ruled by different kinds of regimes and in some places by tribal and
ethnic orders. Realists from the ancient Greeks and Chinese right up through the
mid-twentieth-century French philosopher Raymond Aron and his Spanish
contemporary José Ortega y Gasset believed war is naturally inherent in the
division of humanity into states and other groupings.
6
Indeed, sovereignty and
alliances rarely occur in a void; they arise out of differences with others.
Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional
realists stress what divides us.
And so we come to the map, which is the spatial representation of humanity’s
divisions—the subject of realist writings in the first place. Maps don’t always
tell the truth. They are often as subjective as any fragment of prose. European
names for large swaths of Africa show, in the words of the late British
geographer John Brian Harley, how cartography can be a “discourse of power,”
in this case of latent imperialism. Mercator projections tend to show Europe
larger than it really is. The very bold colorings of countries on the map implies
uniform control over hinterlands, which isn’t always the case.
7
Maps are
materialistic, and therefore morally neutral. They are historically much more a