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

Chapter VIII

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THE “CRISIS OF ROOM”
As a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis some years
back, I taught a course about future challenges in national security. I started the
semester by having the midshipmen read 
Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian
Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age
by Yale political science professor
Paul Bracken. A brief and clairvoyant tour de force that sold poorly when it was
published in 1999, Bracken’s book is very much in the spirit of Mackinder and
Spykman, even as there are no references to them in his text. Bracken, who has
served as a consultant to nearly all Post Cold War American government
reassessments, draws a conceptual map of Eurasia defined by the ongoing
collapse of time and distance, and the filling up of empty spaces—something
that William McNeill first alerted us to in the latter chapters of his grand history
of humanity. But because Bracken writes during a more dramatic stage of this
development, this leads him to declare a “crisis of room.” Bracken refers to the
idea of the great Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann, who
contended that in the past a sparsely populated geography had acted as a safety
mechanism against military and technological advances. Yet von Neumann
worried that geography was now losing the battle. Undeniably, the very “finite
size of the earth” would increasingly be a force for instability, as military
hardware and software condensed distances on the geopolitical map. “This is an
easy change to miss,” Bracken warns, “because it is gradual.”
1
Let me condense Bracken’s thesis into a few pages. For it matters greatly to
the development of my own.
While the Americans and Europeans focus on globalization, the appeal of
nationalism and military power is growing in Eurasia. Missile and bomb tests,
biological warfare programs, and the development of chemical weapons are “the
products of a prosperous, liberalizing Asia,” Bracken notes. What the West has
“failed to recognize” is that the technologies of war and wealth creation have
always been closely connected: from Asia’s economic rise has come its military
rise. In the early Cold War years, Asian military forces were primarily
lumbering, World War II–type armies whose primary purpose, though never
stated, was national consolidation. “The army was an instrument of mass
indoctrination, a giant school with a core curriculum of nationhood.” Soldiers
helped bring in the crops more often than they honed their battlefield skills.
Thus, armies were focused inward, even as many a state army was separated by
enormous tracts of mileage from other state armies. But as national wealth
accumulated and the computer revolution took hold, Asian militaries from the

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oil-rich Middle East to the tiger economies of the Pacific developed full-fledged,
military-civilian postindustrial complexes, with missiles and fiber optics and
cellular phones. At the same time, Eurasian states were becoming
bureaucratically more cohesive, allowing their militaries and their leaders to
focus outward and away from domestic politics, toward other states—becoming
more lethal and professional in the process. Rather than retreat into the
countryside in the face of danger, an option in epochs past, now electronic
sensors monitor international borders with weapons of mass destruction at the
ready. Geography, rather than a cushion, has become a prison from which there
is no escape.
2
“An unbroken belt of countries from Israel to North Korea” (including Syria,
Iran, Pakistan, India, and China) “has assembled either nuclear or chemical
arsenals and is developing ballistic missiles. A multipolar balance of terror
stretches over a 6,000-mile arc,” cutting across military and political theaters and
“regional studies” departments into which the West divides up Asia. The “death
of distance” is upon us, Bracken warns. Take Japan, which ever since North
Korea in 1998 fired a missile across it, landing in the Pacific Ocean, is no longer
a zone of sanctuary, but an integral part of mainland Asia military space, despite
its archipelagic geography. Over the centuries, the concept of Asia was created
by Western maritime power, beginning with the Portuguese at the turn of the
sixteenth century. It was then deconstructed into separate regions by the Cold
War. But in the 1970s, as an economic boom swept East Asia, a large and new
region, the “Pacific Basin,” was formed, the basis for a return to a holistic map
of Asia. This economic success story was possible only because the threat of
force was unthinkable: that, in turn, was because there was a military hegemon,
the United States, which guaranteed the peace. Now, as Asia returns to being a
single organic unit, U.S. power is slowly receding and the military power of
China, India, and other indigenous states is rising. Asia is enlarging as regional
subunits collapse. It is getting more claustrophobic because of the expansion of
both populations and missile ranges; and it is becoming more volatile, because
of the accumulation of weaponry without concomitant alliance structures.
3
As Bracken explains, because of its immense size, for most of history
alliances never mattered much in Asia, as armies were too far removed from one
another to come to one another’s aid. This was unlike the situation in Europe
where many powerful states were bunched up against one another in a narrow
peninsula. But that is now changing. Across Eurasia missiles and weapons of
mass destruction are being built, not infantry forces. The naval and marine
patrols of various states, pulsing with technology, are ranging far from home

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ports in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. China, Japan, India, Israel, and
other nations are developing communications grids using satellites and
underwater listening devices. India, which for most of history found China
largely irrelevant to its security concerns, because the two countries were
separated by the highest mountains in the world, now has its own satellites and
reconnaissance aircraft providing details of Chinese troop movements in Tibet.
Meanwhile, the Indian navy has set up a Far Eastern Command in the Andaman
Islands, 750 miles east of India proper, to counter a Chinese naval presence that
is also far from its home shores. As “Asian industrial power becomes aligned
with Asian military power,” Bracken writes, the continent is literally running out
of room for mistakes and miscalculations, becoming, in effect, “the shrinking
Eurasian chessboard.”
4
To this shrinking chessboard, Bracken adds the destabilizing factor of
“disruptive technologies”: technologies that, rather than help sustain leadership
and the current global power structure, “undermine it by disrupting the status
quo.” Such technologies include computer viruses and weapons of mass
destruction, especially nuclear and biological bombs. Bracken writes:
Disruptive technology changes the game. By upsetting existing
advantages, it nurtures new skills and fosters different strategies. The
resulting uncertainty shakes up the established order and changes the
standards by which leadership is measured.
5
Indeed, disruptive technology, abetted by religious zealotry, brought the
Iranian plateau to the doorstep of geographical Palestine, even though Iran and
Israel are separated by over eight hundred miles. And Iran is merely part of a
trend. As I’ve indicated, rather than shop only for the latest in Western
armaments, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and other countries are
developing disruptive technologies. In an age of former Third World countries
acquiring tactical nuclear weapons, large forward bases like the kind the U.S.
military maintained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait prior to the two Gulf wars may
henceforth be vulnerable to enemy attack. Such a development promises to
hinder America’s projection of power around the Eurasian rimland, and thus
pave the way toward a more unstable, multipolar power arrangement. It is the
freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world
that has preserved American military might. But nuclear and chemical-biological
weapons can destroy these forward sites, or at least render them unusable for a
time. “Preservation of the asymmetric situation,” Bracken writes, “whereby the
greatest military power in Asia is not Asian [but American] depends on arms

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control”—something which is becoming increasingly problematic as former
Third World nations develop disruptive military capabilities. For decades the
United States and the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons without actually
detonating them for “political maneuvers, implicit threats, deterrence, signaling,
drawing lines in the sand, and other forms of psychological advantage.” Now
more countries will want to do likewise, even as some will be motivated by a
rage that is the upshot of poverty, even as they will lack the bureaucratic control
mechanisms to responsibly control the use of these weapons. During the Cold
War, both superpowers approached nuclear warfare with “detachment and
rationality.” That may not be the case in what Bracken calls “the second nuclear
age,” in which Eurasia constitutes a small room crowded with poor countries,
some of which are nuclear powers.
6
“The spread of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in Asia is like the
spread of the six-shooter in the American Old West,” says Bracken. Cheap and
deadly, the six-shooter was an equalizer because it rendered the size and physical
strength of a man much less important. Just as the six-shooter changed the
balance of power among men in the Old West, so do