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

presentness
, the rage and ecstasy and virtue—whatever the case
may be—of the present moment, for good and for bad. In other words, politics in
the mass media age will be more intense than anything we have experienced,
because the past and future will have been obliterated.
Crowd psychology supplanted by technology was at work in the election of
Barack Obama and in the panic selling on Wall Street in 2008. It was at work in
the anti-Muslim pogroms in Hindu Gujarat, in India in 2002, in the mass public
demonstrations in Europe against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, in both the
pro-and anti-regime demonstrations in Iran in 2009 and 2010, in the mass
populist rallies against the Thai government in Bangkok in the same time period,
and endemically in the anti-Israel demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza;
and, of course, in the Middle East’s year of revolution in 2011, even as the Arab
Spring promoted the sanctity of the individual while attacking the power of
autocrats who robbed individuals of their dignity.
It is in the megacities of Eurasia principally where crowd psychology will
have its greatest geopolitical impact. Ideas do matter as the liberal humanists and
anti-determinists proclaim. And it is the very compression of geography that will
provide optimal circumstances for new and dangerous ideologies—as well as for
healthy democratizing ideas. Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly
educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability. Lack of
space will be the key factor. The psychological hearth place of nationalist
identity is increasingly the city and not the idealized rural landscapes of the past,
even as urban crowds will at times demand maximalist foreign policies from
their governments based on this very idealized terrain.
The media will play a crucial role in this process. “No tamer has his animals
more under his power” than the media, writes Oswald Spengler in 
The Decline
of the West:
Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets
and hurl itself upon the target indicated.… A more appalling caricature
of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not
dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only
a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as 
his
liberty.
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Spengler is overly pessimistic and cynical. Nevertheless, recall that the hatred
Soviets and Americans had for each other was cool and abstract, without a racial
basis, separated as they were by oceans and Arctic tundra, during an earlier age
of communications technology. But digital big flat television screens of the

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present and of the future (that, like CNN at airports, you can’t turn off!)
increasingly make everything up close and personal. Here, again, is Bracken:
What westerners find difficult to understand is the intensity of the
feelings that Asians [and Middle Easterners] bring to these religious
and ethnic disputes. Internal disorders could quickly spill over into
whole regions, inflamed by mass media that reach across borders and
by the political logic that seeks a foreign scapegoat for domestic
problems. National leaders could then be backed into a rhetorical
corner—a dangerous place for people who have atom bombs at their
disposal.
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Bracken warns that nationalism is “dangerously underrated” by Western
observers, who see it as part of a retrograde past that economic and social
progress moves us beyond. “The most important issue of the twenty-first century
is understanding how nationalism combines with the newly destructive
technologies appearing in Asia.” As I’ve said, the new nuclear powers, like
Pakistan, India, and China, will have poor and lower-middle-class populations,
and this will abet a resentful, hot-blooded nationalism in an age when the new
military symbols are not armies but missiles and nuclear weapons—the latest
totemic objects of the crowd.
15
Though the possession of missiles as objects of pride will strengthen
nationalism and therefore the power of some states, making patriotism more
potent, the mass psychologies that with the help of the media unite various
ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups, as well as groups dedicated to democratic
universalism, will dilute the power of other states. Meanwhile, some states will
slowly, inexorably lose the battle against globalization, as their bureaucratic
capacities are eroded by long-running wars, attendant refugee movements, and
the job of administering vast, badly urbanized cities. In sum, as the map of
Eurasia gets smaller thanks to technology and population growth, artificial
frontiers will begin to weaken inside it.
Understanding the map of the twenty-first century means accepting grave
contradictions. For while some states become militarily stronger, armed with
weapons of mass destruction, others, especially in the Greater Middle East,
weaken: they spawn substate armies, tied to specific geographies with all of the
cultural and religious tradition which that entails, thus they fight better than state
armies on the same territory ever could. Southern Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the
former Tamil Tigers of northern Sri Lanka, the Maoist Naxalites in eastern and
central India, the various pro-Taliban and other Pushtun tribal groupings in

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northwestern Pakistan, the Taliban itself in Afghanistan, and the plethora of
militias in Iraq, especially during the civil war of 2006–2007, are examples of
this trend of terrain-specific substate land forces. For at a time when precision-
guided missiles can destroy a specific house hundreds of miles away, while
leaving the adjacent one deliberately undamaged, small groups of turbaned
irregulars can use the tortuous features of an intricate mountain landscape to
bedevil a superpower. In the latter case the revenge of geography is clear. But in
the former case, too, those missiles have to be fired from somewhere, which
requires a land or a sea base, thus bringing us back to geography, albeit to a less
intimate and traditional kind. For Spykman’s Indian Ocean Rimland is crucial
for the placement of American warships, whose missiles are aimed deep into
Iran and Afghanistan, two Heartland states, the latter of which is as riven by
tribal conflicts as it was in the time of Alexander the Great. Spykman’s and
Mackinder’s early-twentieth-century constructs coexist with those of antiquity,
and both are relevant for our own era.
The very burden of governing vast, poor urban concentrations has made
statehood more onerous than at any previous time in history; a reason for the
collapse of sclerotic dictatorships, as well as for the weakness of young
democracies. A state like Pakistan can have weapons of mass destruction, even
as it can barely provide municipal services and protect its population from
suicide bombers. States like Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, to name but a few, barely
function, and are besieged by substate militias. The Palestinians, particularly in
Gaza, have engaged in violence to protest their condition, even as they have
eschewed the compromises required for statehood. The same with Hezbollah in
Lebanon, which could have toppled the government in Beirut anytime it wanted,
but chose not to. A state has to abide by certain rules and thus makes for an
easier target. And so we have a new phenomenon in this age of megacities and
mass media: the power of statelessness. “The state is a burden,” writes Jakub
Grygiel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, so these substate
groups “seek power without the responsibility of governing.” Modern
communications and military technologies allow these groups to organize, to
seek help abroad, and to arm themselves with lethal weapons so that the state no
longer owns the monopoly on violence. As I’ve said earlier, whereas the
Industrial Revolution was about bigness (airplanes, tanks, aircraft carriers,
railways, factories, and so on) the post–Industrial Revolution is about smallness
—miniature bombs and plastic explosives that do not require the large territory
of a state to deploy. Small stateless groups are beneficiaries of this new age of
technology. In fact, there are more and more reasons not to have a state. Grygiel
writes:

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The greater the capability of nations to destroy one another, and of the
great powers in particular, the more dangerous it is to have a state,
especially for groups whose goal is to challenge the existing powers.
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A state is a bad fit, he goes on, for those with absolutist goals inspired by
religious zeal or ideological extremism that can never be realized by statehood.
The mass exodus to slums in our era, by cutting off the link with the traditional
countryside, has helped in this process of radicalization along the broad swath of
the southern Eurasian rimland. The mass media, to which these groups have
access, publicize their demands and in the process further fortify their identities,
creating crowd packs of fellow thinkers not necessarily defined by state
loyalties. In sum, if we step back a moment and consider the situation, we have a
map of Eurasia that is one huge area rather than the smaller divisions of Cold
War regions that we have grown used to. This map is overloaded with nodes of
contact and communications that never or barely existed before: for in addition
to extended cities and overlapping missile ranges and ideologies that reverberate
on account of mass media, we will have new roads and ports and energy
pipelines connecting the Middle East and Central Asia with the rest of Eurasia
from Russia to the Indian Ocean to China. With civilizations densely jammed
one against the other, and the media a vehicle for constant verbal outrages, as
well as for popular pressure from oppressed groups, the need for quiet behind-
the-scenes diplomacy will never be greater. One crisis will flow into the next,
and there will be perennial need for everyone to