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

longue durée:
slow, imperceptibly
changing geographical time, “of landscapes that enable and constrain.” Above
this, at a faster wavelength, come the “medium-term cycles,” what Braudel
himself refers to as 
conjonctures
, that is, systemic changes in demographics,
economics, agriculture, society, and politics. Cunliffe explains that these are
essentially “collective forces, impersonal and usually restricted in time to no
more than a century.” Together the 
longue durée
and 
conjonctures
provide the
largely hidden “basic structures” against which human life is played out. My
very highlighting of geography has been designed to put emphasis on these basic
structures. Braudel calls the shortest-term cycle 
l’histoire événmentielle
—the
daily vicissitudes of politics and diplomacy that are the staple of media
coverage. Braudel’s analogy is the sea: in the deepest depths is the sluggish
movement of water masses that bear everything; above that the tides and swells;
and finally at the surface, in Cunliffe’s words, “the transient flecks of surf,
whipped up and gone in a minute.”
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It is impossible to speculate on how geopolitics will play out over the
inhuman timeframe of much of Braudel’s analysis, especially given the
controversy over climate change and its effects on specific regions. To talk about
relations between, say, America and Europe a hundred or two hundred years
hence is ridiculous, because of so many factors that have yet to even appear.
Rather, think of Braudel as simply encouraging us to take a more distant and
dispassionate view of our own foibles. For example, reading Braudel, with the
events of the first decade of the twenty-first century uppermost in one’s mind, it
is impossible to avoid the question: Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
transient flecks of surf only; or are they part of something deeper, more
profound, and structural in America’s destiny? For that matter, might World War
I and World War II even, which saw violence on a scale never before
experienced in history, belong merely to 
l’histoire événmentielle
? Braudel,
precisely because he places the events of humankind against the pressure of
natural forces, facilitates thinking in terms of the 
longue durée
.

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I offer up Braudel as prologue to a remarkable moment at a Washington
conference in June 2009, where a question was raised that gives particular
urgency to my inquiry on the relevance of geography for the United States in the
twenty-first century. It was a question that Braudel would have liked, taking
people away from the obsessions of the moment toward a grander and longer-
term perspective. The event was sponsored by the Center for a New American
Security, where I am a senior fellow. The circumstance was a panel discussion
on what were the next steps that needed to be taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
with a special emphasis on the fine-tuning of counterinsurgency. Panelists
proceeded to engage the inside baseball of “Af-Pak,” as the Afghanistan-
Pakistan border region has come to be addressed by the Washington cognoscenti.
Then another panelist, Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, made an
impolite observation, which I—sitting in the front row—will paraphrase:
A historian looking at this panel from the viewpoint of the distant future might
conclude, Bacevich surmised, that while the United States was deeply focused
on Afghanistan and other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state
failure was developing right on America’s southern border, with far more
profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and
American power than anything occurring half a world away. What have we
achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the 1980s?
Bacevich asked. Why not fix Mexico instead? How we might have prospered
had we put all that money, expertise, and innovation that went into Iraq and
Afghanistan into Mexico.
Therein, sheathed in a simple question, lies the most elemental critique of
American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War: a critique that, as we
shall see, goes far beyond Mexico, encompasses Eurasia, and yet is rooted in
North American geography. I start with Bacevich only because his frustration is
stark and his bona fides particularly impressive—and poignant: a West Point
graduate and Vietnam veteran, his son was killed in Iraq. But whereas Bacevich
in his books can be a polemicist with overwhelming disregard for East Coast
elites and all manner of entanglements in which they embroil America overseas,
there are others whose views substantially dovetail with his. Their analysis,
along with Bacevich’s, is above all rooted in a conscious attempt to get beyond
l’histoire événmentielle
to the longer term. When I think about what truly
worries all of these analysts, Braudel’s 
longue durée
comes to mind.
Bacevich along with Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Paul Pillar, Mark
Helprin, Ted Galen Carpenter, and the late Samuel Huntington are not, in every
case, the most well-known voices in foreign policy analysis, and putting them in
the same category is itself a bit of a stretch. Yet in a composite sense they have

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questioned the fundamental direction of American foreign policy for the longer
term. Walt is a professor at Harvard and Mearsheimer at the University of
Chicago, but with all the prestige which those appointments carry, their book
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
, published in 2007, came in for very
rough treatment because of its allegation that Israel’s supporters in America were
essentially the culprits behind the Iraq War, a war which everyone in this group
of analysts was dead-set against; or against how it was fought. Helprin, a
novelist and former Israeli soldier, takes no prisoners in his belief that China will
be America’s primary military adversary, a belief that Mearsheimer also shares.
They both, along with Pillar, a former CIA analyst, remain in high dudgeon
about the diversion of American resources to useless wars in the Middle East
while China acquires the latest defense technology. Indeed, even if we do
stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, China will be the main beneficiary, able to
build roads and pipelines throughout the region as part of its quest for energy
and strategic minerals and metals. Meanwhile, Carpenter warns severely about
the danger that a violence-plagued Mexico represents; as did Huntington in his
last years. To merge their thoughts, as well as those of others I could name, all of
whom dwell more or less in the realist camp of foreign policy circles, is to reach
the conclusion that America faces three primary geopolitical dilemmas: a chaotic
Eurasian heartland in the Middle East, a rising and assertive Chinese
superpower, and a state in deep trouble in Mexico. And the challenges we face
with China and Mexico are most efficiently dealt with by wariness of further
military involvement in the Middle East. This is the only way that American
power can sustain itself for the decades to come, and survive part of the 
longue
durée
.
Of course, there is safety, a certain smugness for that matter, in such long-term
thinking. None of these men has adequately addressed what, for instance, would
actually happen if we were to withdraw precipitously, say, from Afghanistan.
Would the intelligence that has led to successful drone attacks on al Qaeda in
Waziristan dry up? Would Ayman al-Zawahiri and other surviving luminaries of
al Qaeda make triumphal entries in front of al Jazeera television cameras into
Jalalabad? Would Afghanistan become a radicalized Taliban state under the
tutelage of Pakistani intelligence? Would India, the global pivot state of the
twenty-first century, lose respect for the United States as a consequence? Would
Iran informally annex western Afghanistan? And what would have happened to
Iraq had we withdrawn completely in 2006, at the height of the violence there, as
some of these analysts would have no doubt wished? Would the Balkan-level
sectarian atrocities have soared to the level of Rwanda, with a million killed
rather than a hundred or two hundred thousand? For one would have to be

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