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

Chapter IV

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THE EURASIAN MAP
Times of global upheaval, testing as they do our assumptions about the
permanence of the political map, lead to a renaissance in thinking about
geography. This is particularly so because geography is the very basis for
strategy and geopolitics. Strategy as defined by Napoleon is the art of using time
and space in a military and diplomatic manner. Geopolitics constitutes the study
of the outside environment faced by every state when determining its own
strategy: that environment being the presence of other states also struggling for
survival and advantage.
1
 In short, geopolitics is the influence of geography upon
human divisions.
2
As Napoleon said, to know a nation’s geography is to know
its foreign policy.
3
Morgenthau calls geopolitics a “pseudoscience” because it erects “the factor
of geography into an absolute.” Writing soon after World War II, he had in mind
the great British geographer Halford Mackinder, whose turn-of-the-twentieth-
century theories were revived in the midst of the Second World War and misused
by the Nazis to justify their idea of 
Lebensraum
, or German “living space.”
4
To
be sure, because the aim of geopolitics is to achieve a balance of power, and the
Nazis attempted nothing less than to overthrow the balance of power, the Nazis’
use of Mackinder was a perversion of Mackinder’s own thinking. The balance of
power, according to Mackinder, because it grants each nation its security, forms
the very basis of freedom.
5
Morgenthau may be too hard on Mackinder. In any
case, Morgenthau’s aversion to Mackinder, as well as his careful summary of
Mackinder’s theories, is itself an indication of Mackinder’s powerful influence
over Western geopolitical thought over many decades. Mackinder keeps getting
denounced, and yet remains relevant through it all, especially in eras like our
own, with large numbers of American troops still on the ground in the Greater
Middle East and Northeast Asia. Clearly, there is some unsettling, underlying
truth to his work, though there is also the risk of taking it too far.
Mackinder clearly had a gift. The dictum of his life’s work was that geography
is the generalist’s answer to academic specialization.
6
In 1890, he gave a
singular example of how knowledge of geography enriches one’s thinking on
world affairs:
Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore,
and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer
and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of

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geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that
will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the
word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see
Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain,
at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus
system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water
brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the
climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal
will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what
time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover,
the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great
European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market
it offers for English exports.
7
Mackinder’s ideas and way of putting things, as we shall now see, are
riveting.
Sir Halford J. Mackinder, the father of modern-day geopolitics, which
Morgenthau so disparages, is famous not for a book, but for a single article, “The
Geographical Pivot of History,” published in the April 1904 issue of