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

part of the Caribbean world, and is severed by geography from South America
proper. As Spykman explains:
The mountain ranges which bend eastward from the Andes, separate
the Amazon basin from the valleys of the Magdalena and the Orinoco
and form the southern boundaries of the Guianas. Beyond this lies the
enormous impenetrable jungle and tropical forest of the Amazon
valley. The river and its tributaries offer an excellent system of
communications from west to east but they do not provide
transportation for movements north and south.
6
As for the southern half of South America, geography works to marginalize its
geopolitical importance, Spykman explains. The west coast of South America is
crushed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, the highest mountain range in
the world save for the knot of the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Pamirs, which
separate China from the Indian Subcontinent. The valleys through the Andes,
compared with those through the Appalachians that give the east coast of
America access westward, are narrow and few. The rivers are not navigable, so
that countries such as Chile and Peru, eight thousand miles across the Pacific
from East Asia, and many thousands of miles from either coast of the United
States, are far from the main global channels of communication and historical
migration, and thus cannot raise great navies. Only central and southern Chile lie
in the temperate zone, and as Henry Kissinger once reportedly quipped, Chile is
a dagger thrust at Antarctica. As for the east coast of South America, it is, too,
remote and isolated. Because South America does not lie directly below North
America, but to its east, the populated parts of South America’s Atlantic coast,
from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires—far to the south, below the thickly
wooded Amazon—are no closer to New York than they are to Lisbon.
Dominating the American Mediterranean, and separated from the heart of South
America by yawning distance and a wide belt of tropical forest, the United States
has few challengers in its own hemisphere. The Southern Cone of South
America, Spykman writes, is less a “continental neighbor” than an “overseas
territory.”
7
But there is a negative flip side to much of this. Yes, the Caribbean basin
unites rather than divides, and the trail of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia

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through Central America and Mexico to the United States shows this in action.
The so-called drug war is a salient lesson in geography, which now threatens the
U.S. in its hemispheric backyard. The same with the populist, anti-American
radicalism of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who has been an affront to
American global interests not simply because he has been allied with Russia and
Iran, but because he has been allied with Russia and Iran from his perch on the
Caribbean basin: were he situated below the Amazon rainforest in the Southern
Cone, he would have been less of a threat. Globalization—the Information Age,
the collapsing of distance, the explosion of labor migration from
demographically young countries to demographically graying countries—has
brought the U.S. into an uncomfortably closer relationship with an unstable
Latin America around the Caribbean. Whereas the Caribbean was previously a
place that the U.S. Navy dominated, but which was otherwise separated from the
main currents of American society, it is now part of the very fabric of American
life. Spykman’s ideas presage these developments, even as, obviously, he could
not have predicted their specifics.
Writing in the midst of World War II like Strausz-Hupé, before the fortunes of
war turned in the Allies’ favor, the worldwide threat posed by the Nazis was
uppermost in Spykman’s mind. Consequently, he saw the separation of the
United States from southern South America as of considerable geographical
importance: it was a strategic advantage in that the U.S. did not have to master
the region, the way it had to master the Caribbean basin; but it was a
vulnerability in that the U.S. had no special geographical advantage in the event
of the region being threatened by an adversary from Europe. And the Southern
Cone, from Rio de Janeiro southward—what Spykman calls the “equidistant
zone”—contained the continent’s most productive agricultural regions, three-
quarters of South America’s population, and the major cities of the two most
important South American republics at the time, Brazil and Argentina. Even
allowing for its geographic insignificance compared to Eurasia, Spykman
worried about the Southern Cone becoming part of the encirclement strategy of a
hostile power. Just as the geography of the Americas allowed for the emergence
of the United States as a hemispheric hegemon, the breakup of the Americas into
a free north and an Axis-dominated south would have spelled the end of that
preponderance. “Many of the isolationists,” he writes, “accepted the policy of
hemisphere defense because it seemed a way of avoiding conflict with Germany,
but they overlooked the fact that, even if the U.S. could have avoided war with
Germany over Europe, it could not have avoided a struggle with Germany for
hegemony over South America.”
8
Even though the Axis powers were to be defeated, Spykman’s warning still

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stands, after a fashion. Europe, Japan, and China have made very deep inroads in
trade with Spykman’s equidistant zone, and there is no guarantee that the United
States will remain the dominant outside power in a region in which under 20
percent of its trade is with the U.S., and the flying time from New York to
Buenos Aires is eleven hours, the same time it takes to fly from the U.S. to the
Middle East. Although his obsession was with winning the war, by his single-
minded focus on geography, Spykman is able to show us the world we currently
inhabit.
Spykman was a generation younger than Mackinder, deriving his frame of
reference and inspiration from the English geographer. Latin America constitutes
a long tangent from Spykman’s central concern about Eurasia, which he shared
with Mackinder. Mackinder’s work suggests the struggle of Heartland-
dominated land power versus sea power, with Heartland-based land power in the
better position. Here is Spykman essentially acknowledging the spiritual
influence of Mackinder—even if they assessed differently the relative
importance of sea and land power:
For two hundred years, since the time of Peter the Great, Russia has
attempted to break through the encircling ring of border states and
reach the ocean. Geography and sea power have persistently thwarted
her.
9
Spykman describes the Heartland as vaguely synonymous with the Soviet
Empire, bordered by ice-blocked Arctic seas to the north, between Norway and
the Russian Far East; and to the south ringed by mountains, from the Carpathians
in Romania to the plateaus of Anatolia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and turning
northeastward to the Pamir Knot, the Altai Mountains, the plateau of Mongolia,
and finally over to Manchuria and Korea. This to him was the world’s key
geography, which would be perennially fought over. To the north and inside this
belt of mountain and tableland lies the Heartland; to the south and outside this
belt lie the demographic giants of Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China,
and Japan, as well as the oil-rich Middle East. These marginal areas of Eurasia,
especially their littorals, was what Spykman called the Rimland. Spykman held
that the Rimland was the key to world power; not Mackinder’s Heartland,
because in addition to dominating Eurasia, the maritime-oriented Rimland was
central to contact with the outside world.
10
Of course, both men are really talking about the same thing; for Mackinder

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says that he who controls the Heartland is in the best position to capture the
Rimland, which then provides through sea power the key to world domination.
As Mackinder writes, “If we would take the long view, must we still not reckon
with the possibility that a large part of the Great Continent might someday be
united under a single sway, and that an invincible seapower might be based upon
it?” This, of course, was the dream of the Soviet Union, to advance to the warm
waters of the Indian Ocean through the invasion of Afghanistan and the
attempted destabilization of Pakistan in the 1980s, and thus combine sea power
and land power.
11
Still, Spykman with his emphasis on the Rimland has the slight advantage
here. Given the present state of the world, with Rimland upheavals in the Greater
Middle East and tensions throughout South Asia, as well as the Korean
Peninsula, Spykman with his concentration on the Rimland and his more
complexified view of geopolitics seems almost contemporary. For the body of
Mackinder’s theories emerge from the world at the turn of the twentieth century
and the First World War; whereas Spykman is arguing from the facts of life of a
later war, in which the Heartland was in the hands of an ally, Soviet Russia, and
thus not an issue; whereas the Rimland was endangered by the Axis powers.
While the Axis powers lost the war, the competition for the Rimland
continued into the Cold War. The Soviet Union constituted the great Heartland
power that threatened the Rimland in Europe, the Middle East, the Korean
Peninsula, and elsewhere, and was opposed by Western sea power.
Consequently, “containment,” the Cold War policy against the Soviet Union
enunciated in 1946 by the diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan in his
Long Telegram, had both a Spykmanesque and Mackinderesque feel.
Containment is the peripheral sea power’s name for what the Heartland power
calls encirclement.
12
The defense of Western Europe, Israel, moderate Arab
states, the Shah’s Iran, and the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam all carried the
notion of preventing a communist empire from extending control from the
Heartland to the Rimland. In his landmark work,