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

Pax Hanica
in the
Sinic world as all examples of essentially universal states in which different
peoples and confessions coexisted for mutual benefit. Rome, in particular,
mastered the vexing issue of dual loyalty, with citizenship of the world-city of
Rome and of the particular local territory not in contradiction.
35
It may be,
therefore, that a universal state will on some future morrow prove the panacea
for the Time of Troubles now afflicting northern Mexico and the American
Southwest in the border region.
It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of such a monumental shift in
the conception of national myth and sovereignty, even as it occurs as we speak in
what, by the standards of the media, is geological time. When I hitchhiked across
the United States in 1970, I palpably experienced how no other continent has
been as well suited to nation building as the temperate zone of North America.
The Appalachians had provided a western boundary for a nascent community of

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states through the end of the eighteenth century, but river valleys cutting through
these mountains, such as the Mohawk and the Ohio, allowed for penetration of
the West by settlers. Beyond the Appalachians the settlers found a flat panel of
rich farmland without geographical impediments where, in the nineteenth
century, wealth could be created and human differences ground down to form a
distinctive American culture. The Greater Mississippi basin together with the
Intercoastal Waterway has more miles of navigable rivers than the rest of the
world combined, and it overlays the world’s largest contiguous piece of arable
earth. By the time westering pioneers reached a truly daunting barrier—the Great
American Desert, both east and west of the Rocky Mountains—the
transcontinental railroad was at hand.
36
“The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more
major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined … the Americans
are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live,”
notes a Stratfor document.
37
When the geographer Arnold Guyot examined the
continental United States in 1849, before the Civil War and the triumph of the
Industrial Revolution, he regarded it along with Europe and Asia as one of the
“continental cores” that were destined to control the world. But he believed back
then that America would lead the way over the other two cores. The reasons:
America was protected behind a “screen of ocean” on two sides that,
nevertheless, allowed it to interact with Eurasia; and its development was
assured by the “interconnectibility of the well-watered interior” of the
continent.
38
 “Here, then, is the United States,” writes James Fairgrieve in 1917,
taking its place in the circle of lands, a new 
orbis terrarium;
and yet
outside the [Eurasian] system which has hitherto mattered, compact
and coherent, with enormous stores of energy, facing Atlantic and
Pacific, having relations with east and west of Euro-Asia, preparing by
a fortified Panama Canal to fling her one fleet into either ocean.
39
That continental majesty, framed by two oceans, is still there. But another
conceptual geography is beginning to overlap with it, that of Coronado’s 1540–
1542 journey of exploration from central-western Mexico north through
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Whereas Lewis and
Clark’s 1804–1806 exploration of the Louisiana and Oregon territories brought
America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and thus laid the ideational foundation
of a modern, continental nation-state, Coronado’s exploration—south-to-north
rather than east-to-west—while earlier in time, was in its own way postmodern:
for it was not bounded by any national consciousness, and provided an

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orientation for a future universal state stretching from semitropical Mexico to
temperate North America. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was in search of
gold, plunder, and easy wealth. His was a medieval mentality. But the new
Hispanic migrants heading north are not medieval. They are in search of jobs—
which often entail backbreaking manual labor—and thus they are willing to
work hard for material gain. They are being transformed by the Anglo-Protestant
work ethic just as they transform America’s Anglo-Protestant culture.
The quality and fluidity of this cultural and binational interaction will, arguably,
more than any other individual dynamic, determine how well America interacts
with Mackinder’s World-Island (Eurasia and Africa). American foreign policy
will likely be both wise and unwise by turns in the course of the decades. But
American economic power, cultural power, moral power, and even political and
military power will be substantially affected by whether we can develop into a
cohesive, bilingual supra-state-of-sorts with Mexico and Canada or, instead,
become trapped by a dysfunctional, vast, and increasingly unruly border region
that engenders civilizational tension between America’s still dominant Anglo-
Protestant culture and its Hispanic counterpart. Huntington’s fears are justified;
it is his solution that is partly wrong.
Keep in mind that, as we know from Paul Bracken and others, the earth’s
political geography increasingly constitutes a closed, claustrophobic system.
Cultural and political interchanges across the seas will become more and more
organic. Thus, if the United States and Mexico do not eventually come together
to the degree that the U.S. and Canada already have—if we do not have Mexico
as an intimate and dependable ally in world forums—it will adversely affect
America’s other relationships, especially as Mexico’s (and Central America’s)
population grows at a much higher rate than ours, and thus Mexico will assume
more importance as time goes on. Braudel’s exploration of the sixteenth-century
Mediterranean makes clear the role that natural forces like geography play over
time: that is why Mexico must play a central function in any grand strategy we
decide upon.
Think of the future world as roughly resembling the millet system of the old
Ottoman Empire: a “network of geographically intermingled communities,” in
Toynbee’s words, rather than a “patchwork of … segregated parochial states.”
40
Each relationship will affect the others as never before. As we have seen, future
decades will see rail, road, and pipelines connecting all of Eurasia through a
Central Asian and particularly an Afghan hub. An organic and united Eurasia
will demand as a balancer an organic and united North America, from the

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Canadian Arctic to the Central American jungles. Not to continue to deepen
links with Mexico and Central America, whose combined populations account
for half the population of that of the United States, would be to see Mexico and
perhaps some of its southern neighbors slip into a hostile diplomatic and political
orbit in a world where Eurasia will be closer than ever before. The way to guard
against a pro-Iranian Venezuela and other radical states that may emerge from
time to time in the Western Hemisphere is to wrap the Greater Caribbean into a
zone of free trade and human migration that, perforce, would be American
dominated, as Mexico’s and Central America’s younger populations supply the
labor force for America’s aging one. Of course, this is happening already, but the
intensity of the human exchange will, and should, increase.
“Global war, as well as global peace,” writes Nicholas Spykman, “means that
all fronts and all areas are interrelated. No matter how remote they are from each
other, success or failure in one will have an immediate and determining effect on
the others.”
41
 That is far truer today than it was in 1944 when that statement was
published posthumously. It will be far truer in the future. Robert Strausz-Hupé
notes, “The history of Greece is the struggle for survival against the cyclic
irruptions of Asia.”
42
 Think of how close ancient Greece was to Persia, and one
may get a sense of how close we are to Eurasia now, given the revolution in
transportation and communications. Making sure that one power in the Eastern
Hemisphere does not become unduly dominant, so as to threaten the United
States in the Western Hemisphere, will be a much easier task if we advance unity
in the Western Hemisphere in the first place.
We must be a balancing power in Eurasia and a unifying power in North
America—doing both will be easier than doing just one. Preserving the balance
of power, of course, must be done for a specific purpose that goes beyond the
physical and economic protection of the United States. And that purpose is to
use the stability guaranteed by a balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere to
advance nothing less than the liberal intellectual cause of a