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

part of a Prussian education than of a British one.
8
 Maps, in other words, can be
dangerous tools. And yet they are crucial to any understanding of world politics.
“On the relatively stable foundation of geography the pyramid of national power
arises,” writes Morgenthau.
9
 For at root, realism is about the recognition of the
most blunt, uncomfortable, and deterministic of truths: those of geography.
Geography is the backdrop to human history itself. In spite of cartographic
distortions, it can be as revealing about a government’s long-range intentions as
its secret councils.
10
A state’s position on the map is the first thing that defines it,
more than its governing philosophy even. A map, explains Halford Mackinder,
conveys “at one glance a whole series of generalizations.” 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.
11
While studying the map, any map, can be endlessly
absorbing and fascinating in its own right, geography, like realism itself, is hard
to accept. For maps are a rebuke to the very notions of the equality and unity of
humankind, since they remind us of all the different environments of the earth
that make men profoundly unequal and disunited in so many ways, leading to
conflict, on which realism almost exclusively dwells.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the arrival of political

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science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always
formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often
conceived of in reference to the relief map. According to this materialistic logic,
mountains and tribes matter more than the world of theoretical ideas. Or, rather,
mountains and the men who grow out of them are the first order of reality; ideas,
however uplifting and fortifying, only the second.
It is my contention that in embracing realism in the midst of the Iraq War,
however uneasily we did so—and for however short a time we did so—what we
actually embraced without being aware of it was geography, if not in the overt,
imperialistic Prussian sense of the word, then in the less harsh Victorian and
Edwardian senses. It is the revenge of geography that marked the culmination of
the second cycle in the Post Cold War era, to follow the defeat of geography
through air power and the triumph of humanitarian interventionism that marked
the end of the first cycle. We were thus brought back to the lowering basics of
human existence, where, rather than the steady improvement of the world that
we had earlier envisioned, what we accepted was the next struggle for survival,
and by association, the severe restraints with which geography burdened us in
places such as Mesopotamia and Afghanistan.
And yet within this sad acceptance there is hope: for by becoming more expert
at reading the map, we can, helped by technology as the Arab Spring has
attested, stretch some of the limits the map inflicts. That is the aim of my study
—to have an appreciation of the map so that, counterintuitively, we need not
always be bounded by it. For it is not only narrow-mindedness that leads to
isolationism, but the overstretching of resources that causes an isolationist
backlash.
But first we need to recognize the very centrality of the geographical discipline.
“Nature imposes; man disposes,” writes the English geographer W. Gordon East.
Certainly, man’s actions are limited by the physical parameters imposed by
geography.
12
But these contours are extremely broad, so that human agency has
more than enough room to maneuver. For the Arabs, it turns out, are as capable
of democratic practices as any group, even as the spatial arrangement of Libyan
tribes and of the mountain ranges in Yemen will continue to play crucial roles in
those countries’ political development. Geography informs, rather than
determines. Geography, therefore, is not synonymous with fatalism. But it is,
like the distribution of economic and military power themselves, a major
constraint on—and instigator of—the actions of states.
Yale professor Nicholas J. Spykman, the great Dutch American strategist of

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the early–World War II era, wrote in 1942 that “geography does not argue. It
simply is.” He goes on:
Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of
states because it is the most permanent. Ministers come and go, even
dictators die, but mountain ranges stand unperturbed. George
Washington, defending thirteen states with a ragged army, has been
succeeded by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the resources of a continent
at his command, but the Atlantic continues to separate Europe from the
United States and the ports of the St. Lawrence River are still blocked
by winter ice. Alexander I, Czar of all the Russias, bequeathed to
Joseph Stalin, simple member of the Communist party, not only his
power but his endless struggle for access to the sea, and Maginot and
Clemenceau have inherited from Caesar and Louis XIV anxiety over
the open German frontier.
13
And one might add, that despite 9/11 even, the Atlantic Ocean still matters,
and, in fact, it is the Atlantic that declares a different foreign and military policy
for the United States compared to that of Europe. In the same vein, we can say
that Russia, unto this day, is an insecure and sprawling land power, the victim of
invasions since before those of the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, with
only time, distance, and weather as its friends, craving more access to the sea.
And because there is no serious geographical impediment between Europe and
the Urals, Eastern Europe, despite the collapse of the artificial boundary of the
Berlin Wall, is still under threat from Russia, as it has been for centuries. It is
also true that anxiety over the German frontier plagued France—like in the time
of Louis XIV—through the end of World War II, when the United States finally
guaranteed the peace of Europe.
Indeed, geography is the preface to the very track of human events. It is no
accident that European civilization had important origins in Crete and the
Cycladic islands of Greece, for the former, a “detached fragment of Europe,” is
the closest European point to the civilization of Egypt, and the latter the closest
point to that of Asia Minor.
14
Both, because of their island situations, were for
centuries protected against the ravages of invaders, allowing them to flourish.
Geography constitutes the very facts about international affairs that are so basic
we take them for granted.
What could be a more central fact of European history than that Germany is a
continental power and Great Britain an island? Germany faces both east and
west with no mountain ranges to protect it, providing it with pathologies from

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militarism to nascent pacifism, so as to cope with its dangerous location. Britain,
on the other hand, secure in its borders, with an oceanic orientation, could
develop a democratic system ahead of its neighbors, and forge a special
transatlantic relationship with the United States, with which it shares a common
language. Alexander Hamilton wrote that had Britain not been an island, its
military establishment would have been just as overbearing as those of
continental Europe, and Britain “would in all probability” have become “a
victim to the absolute power of a single man.”
15
And yet Britain is an island
close to continental Europe, and thus in danger of invasion through most of its
history, giving it a particular strategic concern over the span of the centuries with
the politics of France and the Low Countries on the opposite shore of the English
Channel and the North Sea.
16
Why is China ultimately more important than Brazil? Because of geographical
location: even supposing the same level of economic growth as China and a
population of equal size, Brazil does not command the main sea lines of
communication connecting oceans and continents as China does; nor does it
mainly lie in the temperate zone like China, with a more disease-free and
invigorating climate. China fronts the Western Pacific and has depth on land
reaching to oil-and natural-gas-rich Central Asia. Brazil offers less of a
comparative advantage. It lies isolated in South America, geographically
removed from other landmasses.
17
Why is Africa so poor? Though Africa is the second largest continent, with an
area five times that of Europe, its coastline south of the Sahara is little more than
a quarter as long. Moreover, this coastline lacks many good natural harbors, with
the East African ports that traded vigorously with Arabia and India constituting
the exception. Few of tropical Africa’s rivers are navigable from the sea,
dropping as they do from interior tableland to coastal plains by a series of falls
and rapids, so that inland Africa is particularly isolated from the coast.
18
Moreover, the Sahara Desert hindered human contact from the north for too
many centuries, so that Africa was little exposed to the great Mediterranean
civilizations of antiquity and afterward. Then there are the great, thick forests
thrown up on either side of the equator, from the Gulf of Guinea to the Congo
basin, under the influence of heavy rains and intense heat.
19
These forests are no
friends to civilization, nor are they conducive to natural borders, and so the
borders erected by European colonialists were, perforce, artificial ones. The
natural world has given Africa much to labor against in its path to modernity.
Check the list of the world’s most feeble economies and note the high
proportion that are landlocked.
20
Note how tropical countries (those located

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between 23.45 degrees north and south latitudes) are generally poor, even as
most high-income countries are in the middle and high latitudes. 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.
21
In a stunning summation of geographical determinism, the late geographer
Paul Wheatley made the observation that “the Sanskrit tongue was chilled to
silence at 500 meters,” so that Indian culture was in essence a lowland
phenomenon.
22
Other examples of how geography has richly influenced the fate
of peoples in ways both subtle and obvious are legion, and I will get to more of
them in the course of this study.
But before we move on, let me mention the example of the United States. For
it is geography that has helped sustain American prosperity and which may be
ultimately responsible for America’s panhumanistic altruism. As John Adams
notes, “There is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the
same with that of others.”
23
The historian John Keegan explains that America
and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them “from
the landbound enemies of liberty.” The militarism and pragmatism of continental
Europe through the mid-twentieth century, to which the Americans always felt
superior, was the result of geography, not character. Competing states and
empires adjoined one another on a crowded continent. European nations could
never withdraw across an ocean in the event of a military miscalculation. Thus,
their foreign policies could not be grounded by a universalist morality, and they
remained well armed against one another until dominated by an American
hegemon after World War II.
24
It wasn’t only two oceans that gave Americans
the luxury of their idealism, it was also that these two oceans gave America
direct access to the two principal arteries of politics and commerce in the world:
Europe across the Atlantic and East Asia across the Pacific, with the riches of
the American continent lying between them.
25
And yet these same oceans, by
separating America by thousands of miles from other continents, have given
America a virulent strain of isolationism that has persisted to this day. Indeed,
except in its own sphere of influence in the Americas, the United States
zealously resisted great power politics for almost two hundred years: even the

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breakdown of the European state system in 1940 failed to bring America into
World War II. It took an attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to do that. Following the
war, the United States once more withdrew from the world, until the aggression
of the Soviet Union and North Korea’s attack on South Korea forced its troops
back to Europe and Asia.
26
Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign
policy elites have oscillated between quasi-isolationism and idealist-minded
interventionism: all of this at root because of two oceans.
Geography “has been forgotten, not conquered,” writes the Johns Hopkins
University scholar Jakub J. Grygiel.
27
“That technology has canceled geography
contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,” writes Colin S. Gray,
a longtime advisor on military strategy to the British and American
governments. It is not only that, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, “the
exercise of continuous influence or control requires,” in Gray’s words, “the
physical presence of armed people in the area at issue,” it is that anyone who
truly believes that geography has been pivotally downgraded is profoundly
ignorant of military logistics—of the science of getting significant quantities of
men and matériel from one continent to another. What I had experienced in
traveling with the 1st Marine Division overland through Iraq was only a small