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

part of that logistics exercise, which included getting men and equipment
thousands of miles by ship from North America to the Persian Gulf. In a
strikingly clairvoyant analysis in 1999, the American military historian
Williamson Murray wrote that the approaching new century would make the
United States confront once again the “harsh geographic reality” imposed by two
oceans, which limit and make almost insanely expensive the deployment of our
ground troops to far-off locales. While some wars and rescue missions may be
quickly concluded by airborne “raiding” (one thinks of the Israeli attack on
Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976 to rescue hijacked plane passengers), even in
those operations, terrain matters. Terrain determines the pace and method of
fighting. The Falklands War of 1982 unfolded slowly because of the maritime
environment, while the flat deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991
magnified the effect of air power, even as holding vast and heavily populated
stretches of Iraq in the Second Gulf War showed the limits of air power and thus
made American forces victims of geography: aircraft can bombard, but they
cannot transport goods in bulk, nor exercise control on the ground.
28
 Moreover,
in many cases still, aircraft require bases reasonably close by. Even in an age of
intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs, geography matters. As
Morgenthau points out, small-and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain,

---

France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized
states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite
credibility in their nuclear threats. This means that a small state in the midst of
adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly
aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography.
29
But to embrace the relief map along with mountains and men is not to see the
world irrevocably driven by ethnic and sectarian divides that resist globalization.
The story is far more complicated than that. Globalization has itself spurred the
rebirth of localisms, built in many cases on ethnic and religious consciousness,
which are anchored to specific landscapes, and thus explained best by reference
to the relief map. This is because the forces of mass communications and
economic integration have weakened the power of many states, including
artificially conceived ones averse to the dictates of geography, leaving exposed
in some critical areas a fractious, tottering world. Because of communications
technology, pan-Islamic movements gain strength across the entire Afro-Asian
arc of Islam, even as individual Muslim states themselves are under siege from
within.
Take Iraq and Pakistan, which are in terms of geography arguably the two
most illogically conceived states between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian
Subcontinent, even as the relief map decrees Afghanistan to be a weak state at
best. Yes, Iraq fell apart because the United States invaded it. But Saddam
Hussein’s tyranny (which I intimately experienced in the 1980s, and was by far
the worst in the Arab world), one could argue, was itself geographically
determined. For every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in 1958
had to be more repressive than the previous one in order to hold together a state
with no natural borders composed of Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs, seething
with a well-articulated degree of ethnic and sectarian consciousness.
I realize that it is important not to go too far in this line of argument. True, the
mountains that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the
Mesopotamian plain between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may
have been more pivotal to the turn of events than the yearning after democracy.
But no one can know the future, and a reasonably stable and democratic Iraq is
certainly not out of the question: just as the mountains of southeastern Europe
that helped separate the Austro-Hungarian Empire from that of the poorer and
less developed Ottoman Turkish one, and that helped divide ethnic and
confessional groups from one another for centuries in the Balkans, certainly did
not doom our interventions there to stop internecine wars. I am not talking here
of an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, I wish to
argue for a modest acceptance of fate, secured ultimately in the facts of

---

geography, in order to curb excessive zeal in foreign policy, a zeal of which I
myself have been guilty.
The more we can curb this zeal, the more successful will be the interventions
in which we do take part, and the more successful these interventions are, the
more leeway our policymakers will have in the court of public opinion to act
likewise in the future.
I am aware that I am on dangerous ground in raising geography on a pedestal. I
will, therefore, in the course of this study, try to keep in mind always Isaiah
Berlin’s admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published
the following year under the title “Historical Inevitability,” in which he
condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that 
vast impersonal forces
such
as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives
and the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and
Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than
the individuals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “Tradition”
and “History” as “wiser than we.”
30
For Berlin, the individual and his moral
responsibility are paramount, and he or she cannot therefore blame his or her
actions—or fate—altogether, or in great part, on such factors as landscape and
culture. The motives of human beings matter very much to history; they are not
illusions explained away by references to larger forces. The map is a beginning,
not an end to interpreting the past and present.
Of course, geography, history, and ethnic characteristics influence but do not
determine
future events. Nevertheless, today’s foreign policy challenges simply
cannot be solved, and wise choices cannot be made, without substantial
reference to these very factors, which Berlin, in his sweeping attack on all forms
of determinism, seems at first glance to reject. Reliance on geography and ethnic
and sectarian factors could have served us well in anticipating the violence in
both the Balkans, following the end of the Cold War, and in Iraq, following the
U.S. invasion of 2003. Nevertheless, Berlin’s moral challenge holds up well so
far as framing the debates that have taken place in the course of the past two
decades, about where and where not to deploy American troops abroad.
So what to do? How do we split the difference between recognizing the
importance of geography in shaping history and the danger of overemphasizing
that very fact? We can take harbor, I think, in Raymond Aron’s notion of a
“sober ethic rooted in the truth of ‘probabilistic determinism,’ ” because “human
choice always operates within certain contours or restraints such as the
inheritance of the past.”
31
The key word is “probabilistic,” that is, in now

---

concentrating on geography we adhere to a partial or hesitant determinism which
recognizes obvious differences between groups and terrain, but does not
oversimplify, and leaves many possibilities open. As English historian Norman
Davies writes: “I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively
of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all
three.”
32
Liberal internationalists, who generally supported intervention in the
Balkans but opposed it in Iraq, reflect this spirit of fine distinctions. They
intuited, however vaguely, a principal fact of geography: whereas the former
Yugoslavia lay at the most advanced, western extremity of the former Ottoman
Empire, adjacent to Central Europe, Mesopotamia lay at its most chaotic, eastern
reaches. And because that fact has affected political development up through the
present, intervention in Iraq would prove to be a stretch.
So what might that modest fate, that hidden hand, have in store for us in the
years to come? What can we learn from the map, to forewarn us of possible
dangers? Let us review some of the effects of geography on the grand pattern of
world history through the eyes of several great scholars of the twentieth century,
and then look specifically at geography and human intervention through the eyes
of a great man of antiquity. That will prepare us to probe the most time-tested
and provocative geopolitical theories from the modern era, and see where they
take us in describing the world to come.

---