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

poor man’s nukes
and other
disruptive technologies change the global balance of power.
7
The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia “makes the world less Eurocentric,”
and thus greatly accelerates the process of globalization.
8
The geography of
Eurasia will become as intimate as the geography of Europe, where a myriad of
powerful states, uncomfortably confined within a small space, constantly fought
wars, with peace breaking out just as constantly through the practice of balance
of power politics. There will not be the accumulation of masses of
thermonuclear warheads that we saw during the Cold War, so that the peace and
stability obtained by mutually assured destruction will not necessarily result,
even as the damage one state will be able to do to another will be immense and
—in a world of crowded megacities—nearly beyond comprehension. Thus, a
closed geography will demand the ablest practitioners of Metternichian balance
of power statecraft in order to prevent mass violence.
To be sure, we may be entering a world of multidimensional brinkmanship.
The shrinking of the map not only obliterates artificial regions invented by Cold
War area studies, but also renders less distinct Mackinder’s and Spykman’s
conception of a specific pivot and adjacent rimlands, since Eurasia has been
reconfigured by technology into an organic whole. For example, military
assistance from China and North Korea to Iran can cause Israel at the other end
of the Eurasian landmass to take specific military actions. Because of vivid
television images, bombs falling on Gaza can now incite crowds in Indonesia.

---

The U.S. Air Force can attack landlocked Afghanistan from the island of Diego
Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean. While local militaries used to be
confined to their regions, increasingly the Chinese and Indian navies will be
projecting power from the Gulf of Aden all the way to the South China Sea and
the Sea of Japan—along the whole navigable rimland, that is. There are many
more such examples of political situations in one part of Eurasia echoing and
reechoing back from other parts. This does not negate geography, it just means
that we have to add other factors to it. It no longer reigns supreme to the extent
that it used to.
The worries of Mackinder and Spykman will not only be intensified by the
disruptive technologies that Bracken concentrates on, but by the sheer rise of
urban populations themselves, which will make the map of Eurasia only more
claustrophobic. In the 1990s, during the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold
War, when the terms “realist” and “determinist” were vilified in the heady days
following the overthrow of communism, the ideas of the late-eighteenth century
English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus were mocked by many intellectuals
as too grim and fatalistic: for Malthus treats humankind as a species reacting to
its physical environment, rather than as a body of self-willed individuals
motivated by ideas. Malthus’s specific theory—that population increases
geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically—was wrong. Yet
as the years pass, with great fluctuations in world food and energy prices, and
teeming multitudes of angry, 
lumpen
faithful—young males predominantly—
walled off in places like Karachi and Gaza (the Soweto of the Middle East),
Malthus, the first philosopher to focus on demography and the political effects of
the quality of life among the poor, has been getting more respect. Half the
population of the West Bank and Gaza is under fifteen. Indeed, while the
population of the Greater Middle East grows from 854 million to over 1.2 billion
over the next twenty years, with the Arab world in the midst of nearly doubling
its population even as supplies of groundwater greatly diminish, especially in
places like Yemen, leading to explosive side effects on politics, the word
“Malthusian” will be heard more often.
Though proving Malthus right may be a useless exercise, his general
worldview fits well with Bracken’s conception of a loss of room in Eurasia.
Crowded megacities, beset by poor living conditions, periodic rises in the price
of commodities, water shortages, and unresponsive municipal services, will be
fertile petri dishes for the spread of both democracy and radicalism, even as
regimes will be increasingly empowered by missiles and modern, outwardly

---

focused militaries.
The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography. There are
already twenty-five cities in the world with a population of over 10 million
people, and that number will rise to forty by 2015, with all but two in the former
Third World. Greater Tokyo leads with 35 million; Lagos is at the bottom with
nearly 12 million. Thirteen of the twenty-five are in South or East Asia. Karachi,
Tehran, Istanbul, and Cairo are the megacities in the Greater Middle East. The
key fact is that there are many cities in the former Third World which just miss
making the list, and that over half of humanity now lives in urban conditions, a
statistic that will rise to two-thirds by 2025. There are 468 cities in the world
with populations exceeding one million. Almost all urban growth in the future
will be in developing countries, specifically in Asia and Africa. We are in an era
with a significant percentage of people living in slumlike conditions. During
Mackinder’s time at the turn of the twentieth century, only 14 percent of
humanity were urbanites.
As I’ve noted, Ibn Khaldun writes in his