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

calm down
. Because of the
map’s very cohesion and shrinkage, concepts like “Heartland” and “Rimland”
and “marginal” zones, which imply a horizontal separating out into large
component parts, will in one sense be less relevant, but in another sense will be
fraught with consequence because of the perpetual interactions between these
areas: a watch, or a computer chip for that matter, is no less complex because of
its size, and to understand how that watch or chip works one must still
disaggregate it to see how one part affects the other. The airplane, the Internet,
the concentration of politics in vast cities that more and more look like one
another will, to be sure, erode the importance of the relief map. Indeed, the very
orality of the Internet has a way of turning territorial battles into battles of ideas
(a reason why the humanism of Isaiah Berlin is something we will desperately
need to hold on to). But as states themselves, no matter how well armed, become
fragile, precisely because of how democracy and cyberspace will be friendly to
subnational and supranational forces, smaller regions will emerge in bolder lines,
as they did during the Middle Ages following the breakup of the Roman Empire.
Yet now that we inhabit Mackinder’s “closed political system,” which, as

---

Bracken notes, has closed much further in the course of the twentieth century,
the map is also subject to the law of entropy, meaning a state of equilibrium will
eventually set in, with each human habitation on the relief map—not just the
megacities—looking increasingly like one another, and be subject to similar
passions. The result, according to Ohio State University political science
professor Randall L. Schweller, is that “a sort of global ennui” will result, the
consequence of overstimulation, “mixed with a disturbingly large dose of
individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states.”
17
In other words, the
world will be both duller and more dangerous than ever before.
But before the dullness completely sets in, there will upheavals and power
shifts and natural geopolitical evolutions that can usefully be described by
reference to the relief map.
It is now time to explore in depth various regions of the globe, with a particular
emphasis on the super-continent of Eurasia, bearing in mind all that we have
learned from these historians, geopoliticians, and other thinkers. For in the
chapters that follow, I will try to adhere to their sensibilities as well as to their
theories. I will write about Europe, which lies adjacent to Mackinder’s Heartland
and is so influenced by it; about Russia, Mackinder’s Heartland itself; China,
which may in future decades come to dominate part of the Heartland and part of
Spykman’s Rimland; the Indian Subcontinent, which forms the core region of
the Rimland; Iran, where the Heartland and Rimland actually meet; the Turkish
and Arab Middle East, which approximates Hodgson’s Oikoumene; and finally
North America, the largest of Mackinder’s continental satellites to challenge
Eurasia and the World-Island. I will try not to make predictions, but rather to
describe geography as it affects history, so as to get some idea of what the future
might hold.

---