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

part of their homeland, and so “enjoy a sense of being on their own turf” that
other immigrants do not share. Mexican Americans into the third generation and
beyond maintain their competence in their native language to a far greater degree
than do other immigrants, largely because of the geographical concentration of
Hispanic communities that manifests the demographic negation of the Texan and
Mexican-American wars. What’s more, Mexican naturalization rates are among
the lowest of all immigrant groups. Huntington points out that a nation is a
“remembered community,” that is, one with a historical memory of itself.
Mexican Americans, who account for 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, not
counting other Hispanics, and are, more or less, concentrated in the Southwest,
contiguous to Mexico, are for the first time in America’s history amending our
historical memory.
29
University of New Mexico professor Charles Truxillo predicts that by 2080
the Southwestern states of the U.S. and the northern states of Mexico will band
together to form a new country, “La República del Norte.” By 2000, six of
twelve important cities on the U.S. side of the border were over 90 percent
Hispanic, and only two (San Diego, California, and Yuma, Arizona) were less
than 50 percent Hispanic.
30
The blurring of America’s Southwestern frontier is becoming a geographical
fact that all the security devices on the actual border itself cannot invalidate.
Nevertheless, while I admire Huntington’s ability to isolate and expose a
fundamental dilemma that others in academia and the media are too polite to
address, I do not completely agree with his conclusions. Huntington believes in a
firm reliance on American nationalism in order to preserve its Anglo-Protestant
culture and values in the face of the partial Latinoization of our society. I believe
that while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set
contours on what is achievable and what isn’t. And the organic connection
between Mexico and America—geographical, historical, and demographic—is
simply too overwhelming to suppose that, as Huntington hopes, American
nationalism can stay as pure as it is. Huntington correctly derides
cosmopolitanism (and imperialism, too) as elite visions. But a certain measure of
cosmopolitanism, Huntington to the contrary, is inevitable and not to be
disparaged.

---

America, I believe, will actually emerge in the course of the twenty-first
century as a Polynesian-cum-mestizo civilization, oriented from north to south,
from Canada to Mexico, rather than as an east to west, racially lighter-skinned
island in the temperate zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
31
This
multiracial assemblage will be one of sprawling suburban city-states, each in a
visual sense progressively similar to the next, whether Cascadia in the Pacific
Northwest or Omaha-Lincoln in Nebraska, each nurturing its own economic
relationships with cities and trading networks throughout the world, as
technology continues to collapse distances. America, in my vision, would
become the globe’s preeminent duty-free hot zone for business transactions, a
favorite place of residence for the global elite. In the tradition of Rome, it will
continue to use its immigration laws to asset-strip the world of its best and
brightest, and to further diversify an immigrant population that, as Huntington
fears, is defined too much by Mexicans. In this vision, nationalism will be,
perforce, diluted a bit, but not so much as to deprive America of its unique
identity, or to undermine its military. In short, America is no longer an island,
protected by the Atlantic and Pacific. It is brought closer to the rest of the world
not only by technology, but by the pressures of Mexican and Central American
demography.
But this vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If President
Calderón and his successors can succeed in the mission to break the back of the
drug cartels once and for all (a very difficult prospect, to say the least) then the
United States will have achieved a strategic victory greater than any possible in
the Middle East. A stable and prosperous Mexico, working in organic concert
with the United States, would be an unbeatable combination in geopolitics. A
post-cartel Mexico, combined with a stabilized and pro-American Colombia
(now almost a fact), would fuse together the Western Hemisphere’s largest, third
largest, and fourth largest countries in terms of population, easing America’s
continued sway over Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. In a word,
Bacevich is correct in his inference: fixing Mexico is more important than fixing
Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, as Bacevich claims, Mexico is a possible disaster that our
concentration on the Greater Middle East has diverted us from; and if it stays
that way, it will lead to more immigration, legal and especially illegal, that will
create the scenario that Huntington fears. Calderón’s offensive against the drug
lords has claimed 47,000 lives since 2006, with close to 4,000 victims in the first
half of 2010 alone. Moreover, the cartels have graduated to military-style
assaults, with complex traps set and escape routes closed off. “These are war-
fighting tactics they’re using,” concludes Javier Cruz Angulo, a Mexican

---

security expert. “It’s gone way beyond the normal strategies of organized crime.”
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the
Cato Institute in Washington, writes: “If that trend persists, it is an extremely
worrisome development for the health, perhaps even the viability, of the
Mexican state.” The weaponry used by the cartels is generally superior to that of
the Mexican police and comparable to that of the Mexican military. Coupled
with military-style tactics, the cartels can move, in Carpenter’s words, “from
being mere criminal organizations to being a serious insurgency.” United
Nations peacekeepers have deployed in places with less violence than Ciudad
Juárez and Tijuana. Already, police officers and local politicians are resigning
their posts for fear of assassination, and Mexican business and political elites are
sending their families out of the country, even as there is sustained middle-and
upper-middle-class flight to the United States.
32
Mexico is now at a crossroads: it is either in the early phase of finally taking
on the cartels, or it is sinking into further disorder; or both. Because its future
hangs in the balance, what the United States does could be pivotal. But while
this is happening, the U.S. security establishment has been engaged in other
notoriously corrupt and unstable societies half a world away, Iraq until 2011 and
Afghanistan at least until 2014.
Unlike those places, the record of U.S. military involvement in the Mexican
border area is one of reasonable success. Even as proximity to Mexico threatens
the United States demographically, it helps in a logistical sense when trying to
control the border. As Danelo points out, during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the United States and Mexico reduced banditry on the border through
binational cooperation. From 1881 to 1910, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz
joined with American presidents to jointly patrol the border. Mexican 
rurales
rode with Texas Rangers in pursuing the Comanche. In Arizona, Mexican and
American soldiers mounted joint campaigns against Apaches. Today, the job of
thwarting drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain in the mountains and steppe
reaching back from Ciudad Juárez is a job for the military, quietly assisting
Mexican authorities, but the legal framework for such cooperation does not
exist, partly because of strict interpretation of nineteenth-century posse
comitatus laws on the U.S. side.
33
 While we have spent hundreds of billions of
dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about
what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that
verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and
Afghanistan combined.

---

Surely, one can argue that, with Herculean border controls, a functional and
nationalist America can coexist alongside a dysfunctional and partially chaotic
Mexico. But that is mainly true in the short run. In the long run, looking deep
into the twenty-first century and beyond, again, as Toynbee notes, a border
between a highly developed society and a less highly developed society will not
attain an equilibrium, but will advance in the more backward society’s favor. In
other words, the preservation of American nationalism to the degree that would
satisfy Huntington is unachievable unless Mexico reaches First World status.
And if Mexico does reach First World status, then it might become less of a
threat, and the melding of the two societies only quickens. Either way, because
of the facts that the map imposes, we are headed for a conjoining of Mexico and
America in some form; though, of course, the actions of policymakers on both
sides of the border can determine on what terms and under what circumstances
that occurs. Here is Toynbee:
The erection of a [Roman] 
limes
sets in motion a play of social forces
which is bound to end disastrously for the builders. A policy of non-
intercourse with the barbarians beyond is quite impracticable.
Whatever the imperial government may decide, the interests of traders,
pioneers, adventurers, and so forth will inevitably draw them beyond
the frontier.
34
Toynbee also writes that “a universal state is imposed by its founders, and
accepted by its subjects, as a panacea for the ills of a Time of Troubles.” He
mentions “Middle Empire” Egypt, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Achaemenid
Persia, the Seleucid Monarchy, the Roman Peace, and the