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

sea-to-shining-sea
of continental and patriotic myth.

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(This will be amplified by the scheduled 2014 widening of the Panama Canal,
which will open the Caribbean Basin to megaships from East Asia, leading to the
further development of Gulf of Mexico port cities in the United States, from
Texas to Florida.)
15
Half the length of America’s southern frontier is an artificial boundary line in
the desert established by treaties following the Mexican-American War of 1846–
1848. Crossing this border once, having traveled by bus north from Mexico City,
was as much of a shock for me as crossing the Jordan-Israel border and the
Berlin Wall. Surrounded by beggars on the broken sidewalk of Nogales, Sonora,
I stared at the American flag indicating the border. The pedestrian crossing point
to Nogales, Arizona, was in a small building. Merely by touching the door
handle, I entered a new physical world. The solidly constructed handle with its
high-quality metal, the clean glass, and the precise manner in which the room’s
ceramic tiles were fitted seemed a revelation after weeks amid slipshod Mexican
construction. There were only two people in the room: an immigration official
and a customs official. Neither talked to the other. In government enclosures of
that size in Mexico and other Third World countries there were always crowds of
officials and hangers-on lost in animated conversation, sipping tea or coffee.
Looking through the window at the car lanes, I saw how few people there were
to garrison the border station, yet how efficiently it ran. Soon, as in Israel, I was
inside a perfectly standardized yet cold and alienating environment, with empty
streets and the store logos made of tony polymers rather than of rusted metal and
cheap plastic. Because of the turbulence and semi-anarchy I had experienced
amid over 100 million Mexicans for weeks just to the south, these quiet streets
appeared vulnerable, unnatural even. Arnold Toynbee writes, in reference to the
barbarians and Rome, that when a frontier between a highly and less highly
developed society “ceases to advance, the balance does not settle down to a
stable equilibrium but inclines, with the passage of time, in the more backward
society’s favor.”
16
Since 1940, Mexico’s population has risen more than five-fold. Between 1970
and 1995 it nearly doubled. Between 1985 and 2000 it rose by over a third.
Mexico’s population of 111 million is now more than a third that of the United
States, and growing at a faster rate. Nevertheless, East Coast elites display
relatively little interest in Mexico. The actual daily challenges, incidents, and
business and cultural interactions between Mexico and the border states of
California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are geographically distant from the
concerns of East Coast elites: which, instead, focus on the wider world and on
America’s place in it. Truly, Mexico registers far less in the elite imagination

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than does Israel or China, or India even. Yet Mexico could affect America’s
destiny more than any of those countries. Mexico, together with the United
States and Canada, comprises the most crucial of the continental satellites
hovering around Mackinder’s World-Island.
In the Valley of Mexico once stood the great lake holding the two Aztec Venices
of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco: here now stands Mexico City. This is the Nile
valley of the New World, “the matrix of civilization” for both North and South
America, in the words of historian Henry Bamford Parkes, from where the
cultivation of maize spread over the two continents. Lying midway between the
Atlantic and Pacific, and joining along with Central America the two continental
landmasses of the Western Hemisphere, the Valley of Mexico and the country
that has grown out of it form one of the earth’s great civilizational cores.
17
Yet Mexico, unlike Egypt, exhibits no geographical unity. Two great mountain
ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental, lie on either
side of a rugged central plateau. Then there are other, cross-cutting mountain
ranges, mainly in the south: the Sierra Madre del Sur, the Sierra Madre de
Oaxaca, and so on. Mexico is so mountainous that if it were flattened it would be
the size of Asia. The Yucatán Peninsula and Baja California are both essentially
separate from the rest of Mexico, which is itself infernally divided. This is the
context to understand northern Mexico’s ongoing, undeclared, substantially
unreported, and undeniable unification with the Southwestern United States, and
consequent separation from the rest of Mexico.
Northern Mexico’s population has more than doubled since the North
American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. The U.S. dollar is now a
common unit of exchange as far south as Culiacán, halfway to Mexico City.
Northern Mexico is responsible for 87 percent of all