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

particular its Heartland, Mackinder is vital to an understanding of Cold War
geography; whereas Spykman has a more organic conception of the entire globe,
and thus is more relevant than Mackinder in an age in which every place can
affect every other place.
The strategic and geographic heart of the New World is what Spykman calls
the “American Mediterranean,” that is, the Greater Caribbean Sea, including the
Gulf of Mexico. Just as Athens gained effective control of the Greek archipelago
by dominating the Aegean, and Rome took command of the Western world by
dominating the European Mediterranean, America, Spykman explains, became a
world power when it was able, finally, in the Spanish-American War of 1898, to
take unquestioned control of the “middle sea,” or Caribbean, from European
colonial states, which would allow for the construction of the Panama Canal
soon after. “No serious threat against the position of the United States can arise
in the region itself,” he says about the Caribbean basin. “The islands are of
limited size, and the topography of Central America, like that of the Balkan
peninsula … favors small political units. Even the countries of large size like
Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela are precluded by topography, climate, and
absence of strategic raw materials from becoming great naval powers.” The U.S.
Navy can blockade the eastern boundary of the Caribbean and cut these states off
from world markets, thus they are in the final analysis dependent on the United
States. Spykman’s strength, as well as that of other thinkers I cover here, is the
ability to see through the hurly-burly of current events and reveal basic truths.
And the basic geographical truth of the Western Hemisphere, he says, is that the
division inside it is not between North America and South America, but between
the area north of the equatorial jungle dominated by the Amazon and the area
south of it. It follows that Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the Guianas,
although they are on the northern coast of South America, are functionally part
of North America and the American Mediterranean. Their geopolitical world is
the Caribbean, and they have relatively little to do with the countries south of the

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Amazonian jungle, despite sharing the same continent: for like the European
Mediterranean, the American Mediterranean does not divide but unites. Just as
North Africa is part of the Mediterranean world, but is blocked by the Sahara
Desert from being part of Africa proper, the northern coast of South America is