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

The
Peloponnesian War
. Fourteen years elapsed from Athens’s first foray into Sicily
to its final disaster there in the naval battle of Syracuse in 413 
B.C
., the same
number of years between the early forays of the John F. Kennedy administration
in Vietnam and President Gerald Ford’s final withdrawal after Saigon was
overrun. The Sicilian War split the home front in Athens, as did the Vietnam and
Iraq wars. Paralyzed by pessimism and recriminations, it was some time before
Athenians were willing to resume in earnest the bipolar conflict with Sparta.
Sicily, as it turned out, had not been altogether crucial to the survival of Athens’s
democracy and its maritime empire. For despite having lost and suffered so
much, Athens still had the resources to lead an alliance, even as the adventure in
Sicily would prove to be the turning point in the Peloponnesian War, which
Athens lost.
There also is the larger example of the decline of Rome, detailed in 1976 by
Edward N. Luttwak in his book 
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From
the First Century A.D. to the Third
. Luttwak’s method is, rather than to talk
about decline in general, to discuss it in terms of Rome’s grand strategy. Luttwak
identifies three chronological stages of Roman grand strategy. The first is the
Julio-Claudian system, or that of the republican empire, in which the client states
that surrounded the empire’s Italianate core were sufficiently impressed with the
“totality” of Roman power to carry out the empire’s wishes, without the need of
occupation armies. In this stage, diplomacy—not military force—was an active
ingredient of Roman coercion, even as an overwhelming formation of Roman
troops lay in a “vast circle” around Rome. Because these troops were not needed
for the occupation of client states, or for territorial defense in any sense, they
were, in Luttwak’s words, “inherently mobile and freely redeployable.” Here
was power at its zenith, prudently exercised, run on an economy-of-force
principle. A surge capacity was readily available for any military contingency,
and all in the Mediterranean world knew it. Thus everyone feared Rome. One

---

thinks of Ronald Reagan’s America, with a massive buildup of the military that
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was, nevertheless, hell-bent not to use, so
as to nurture the reputation of power without the need for risky adventures. The
Antonine system, in place from the mid-first century to the mid-third, reflected
what Luttwak calls the “territorialization” of the empire: for Rome now felt the
need to deploy its military everywhere, in the client states themselves, in order to
secure their fealty, and so the economy-of-force principle was lost. Nevertheless,
the empire was prosperous, and there was widespread, voluntary Romanization
of the barbarian tribes, “eliminating the last vestiges of nativist disaffection” for
the time being. Yet this very Romanization of the empire would over time create
unity among different tribes, allowing them to band together in common cause
against Rome, for they were now joined in a culture that was still not their own.
Think of how globalization, which in a sense constitutes an Americanization of
the world, nevertheless serves as a vehicle to defy American hegemony. Hence
came the third system to constitute Rome’s grand strategy: Diocletian’s
“defense-in-depth,” whereby the border peoples coalesced into formal
confederations able to challenge Rome, and so the state was on the defensive
everywhere, with emergency deployments constant. The surge capacity that even
the second system retained was lost. With its legions at the breaking point, fewer
and fewer feared Rome.
10
Alas, we are in frighteningly familiar territory. Just as Roman power stabilized
the Mediterranean littoral, the American Navy and Air Force patrol the global
commons to the benefit of all, even as this very service—as with Rome’s—is
taken for granted, and what has lain exposed over the past decade was the
overstretch of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, busy trying to tamp down
rebellions in far corners of the earth. America must, therefore, contemplate a
grand strategy that seeks to restore its position from something akin to Rome’s
third system to its second; or to its first. While America does not have client
states, it does have allies and like-minded others, whom it needs to impress in
order to make them more effective on its behalf. America can do that best
through an active diplomacy and the buildup of a reserve of troops, used
sparingly, so as to restore its surge capacity, of the kind Rome enjoyed under the
original Julio-Claudian system. Rome’s very longevity proved its grand strategy
a success, and yet its ultimate decline and tumultuous fall in Western Europe was
due to a failure to adapt to the formation of new national groupings to its north
that would provide the outlines of modern European states. Because of these
formations, the Roman Empire was headed for extinction in any case. But it
need not have happened as soon as it did, and in the way that it did.
Rome’s real failure in its final phase of grand strategy was that it did not

---

provide a mechanism for a graceful retreat, even as it rotted from within. But it
is precisely—and counterintuitively—by planning for such a deft exit from a
hegemony of sorts that a state or empire can actually prolong its position of
strength. There is nothing healthier for America than to prepare the world for its
own obsolescence. That way it labors for a purpose, and not merely to enjoy
power for its own sake.
How does America prepare itself for a prolonged and graceful exit from history
as a dominant power? Like Byzantium, it can avoid costly interventions, use
diplomacy to sabotage enemies, employ intelligence assets to strategic use, and
so on.
11
It can also—and this leads back to Bacevich—make sure it is not
undermined from the south the way Rome was from the north. America is
bordered by oceans to the east and west, and to the north by the Canadian Arctic,
which provides for only a thin band of middle-class population on America’s
border. (The American-Canadian frontier is the most extraordinary of the
world’s frontiers because it is long, artificial, and yet has ceased to matter.
12
) But
it is in the Southwest where America is vulnerable. Here is the one area where
America’s national and imperial boundaries are in some tension: where the
coherence of America as a geographically cohesive unit can be questioned.
13
For
the historical borderland between America and Mexico is broad and indistinct,
much like that of the Indian Subcontinent in the northwest, even as it reveals
civilizational stresses. Stanford historian David Kennedy notes, “The income
gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two
contiguous countries in the world,” with American GDP nine times that of
Mexico.
14
America’s foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its society,
and nothing will affect its society more than the dramatic movement of Latin
history northward. Mexico and Central America constitute a growing
demographic powerhouse with which the United States has an inextricable
relationship. Mexico’s population of 111 million plus Central America’s of 40
million constitute half the population of the United States. Because of NAFTA
(the North American Free Trade Agreement), 85 percent of all Mexico’s exports
go to the United States, even as half of all Central America’s trade is with the
U.S. While the median age of Americans is nearly thirty-seven, demonstrating
the aging tendency of its population, the median age in Mexico is twenty-five
and is much lower than that in Central America (twenty in Guatemala and
Honduras, for example). The destiny of the United States will be north–south,
rather than the east–west,