Geography has commanded history but ultimately will not command the
future. What geography did was generally contain the embryo nation
state and in time the modern nation state. It channeled ambitions in
the premodern world and one could not understand that history without
understanding the ground.
The modern world which is now steadily emerging is very different.
What matters now are people alone and not those who think to lead
them. The people are not bound to geography at all and in time will
even have the option of migrating to space habitats.
Today is is completely possible to transfer an entire population to
create completely new cities that captures the entire population.
The lands left behind can then be industrially farmed. Today,
peoples are doing all this themselves at their own pace, but it could
be forced and has been forced.
We may still find it necessary to impose the solution in some areas.
Many have not learned yet that disputed lands are in fact disputes
over responsibility and obligation and no longer a dispute over
advantage. Active disputes today simply produce a wasteland.
Most of this item echos the old ethos which still informs many.
Dealing with it is mostly a matter of patience.
Geography Strikes
Back
To understand today's
global conflicts, forget economics and technology and take a hard
look at a map, writes Robert D. Kaplan
By ROBERT D.
KAPLAN
If you want to know
what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don't read their newspapers
or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can
reveal as much about a government's aims as its secret councils. More
than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a
state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of
history, culture and natural resources. With upheaval in the Middle
East and a tumultuous political transition in China, look to
geography to make sense of it all.
As a way of explaining
world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics,
globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty
aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign
policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend
to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of
imagination.
But this is nonsense.
Elite molders of public opinion may be able to dash across oceans and
continents in hours, allowing them to talk glibly of the "flat"
world below. But while cyberspace and financial markets know no
boundaries, the Carpathian Mountains still separate Central Europe
from the Balkans, helping to create two vastly different patterns of
development, and the Himalayas still stand between India and China, a
towering reminder of two vastly different civilizations.
Technology has
collapsed distance, but it has hardly negated geography. Rather, it
has increased the preciousness of disputed territory. As the Yale
scholar Paul Bracken observes, the "finite size of the earth"
is now itself a force for instability: The Eurasian land mass has
become a string of overlapping missile ranges, with crowds in
megacities inflamed by mass media about patches of ground in
Palestine and Kashmir. Counterintuitive though it may seem, the way
to grasp what is happening in this world of instantaneous news is to
rediscover something basic: the spatial representation of humanity's
divisions, possibilities and—most important—constraints. The map
leads us to the right sorts of questions.
Why, for example, are
headlines screaming about the islands of the South China Sea? As the
Pacific antechamber to the Indian Ocean, this sea connects the
energy-rich Middle East and the emerging middle-class fleshpots of
East Asia. It is also thought to contain significant stores of
hydrocarbons. China thinks of the South China Sea much as the U.S.
thinks of the Caribbean: as a blue-water extension of its mainland.
Vietnam and the Philippines also abut this crucial body of water,
which is why we are seeing maritime brinkmanship on all sides. It is
a battle not of ideas but of physical space.
The same can be said
of the continuing dispute between Japan and Russia over the South
Kuril Islands.
Why does President
Vladimir Putin covet buffer zones in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus,
just as the czars and commissars did before him? Because Russia still
constitutes a vast, continental space that is unprotected by
mountains and rivers. Putin's neo-imperialism is the expression of a
deep geographical insecurity.
Or consider the decade
since 9/11, which can't be understood apart from the mountains and
deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. The mountains of the Hindu Kush
separate northern Afghanistan, populated by Tajiks and Uzbeks, from
southern and eastern Afghanistan, populated by Pushtuns. The Taliban
are Sunni extremists like al Qaeda, to whom they gave refuge in the
days before 9/11, but more than that, they are a Pushtun national
movement, a product of Afghanistan's harsh geographic divide.
Moving eastward, we
descend from Afghanistan's high tableland to Pakistan's steamy Indus
River Valley. But the change of terrain is so gradual that, rather
than being effectively separated by an international border,
Afghanistan and Pakistan comprise the same Indo-Islamic world. From a
geographical view, it seems naive to think that American diplomacy or
military activity alone could divide these long-interconnected lands
into two well-functioning states.
As for Iraq, ever since antiquity, the mountainous north and the
riverine south and center have usually been in pitched battle. It
started in the ancient world with conflict among Sumerians, Akkadians
and Assyrians. Today the antagonists are Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.
The names of the groups have changed but not the cartography of war.
The U.S. itself is no exception to this sort of analysis. Why are
we the world's pre-eminent power? Americans tend to think that it is
because of who we are. I would suggest that it is also because of
where we live: in the last resource-rich part of the temperate zone
settled by Europeans at the time of the Enlightenment, with more
miles of navigable, inland waterways than the rest of the world
combined, and protected by oceans and the Canadian Arctic.
Even so seemingly modern a crisis as Europe's financial woes is an
expression of timeless geography. It is no accident that the capital
cities of today's European Union (Brussels, Maastricht, Strasbourg,
The Hague) helped to form the heart of Charlemagne's ninth-century
empire. With the end of the classical world of Greece and Rome,
history moved north. There, in the rich soils of protected forest
clearings and along a shattered coastline open to the Atlantic,
medieval Europe developed the informal power relations of feudalism
and learned to take advantage of technologies like movable type.
Indeed, there are several Europes, each with different patterns of
economic development that have been influenced by geography. In
addition to Charlemagne's realm, there is also Mitteleuropa, now
dominated by a united Germany, which boasts few physical barriers to
the former communist east. The economic legacies of the Prussian,
Habsburg and Ottoman empires still influence this Europe, and they,
too, were shaped by a distinctive terrain.
Nor is it an accident that Greece, in Europe's southeastern
corner, is the most troubled member of the EU. Greece is where the
Balkans and the Mediterranean world overlap. It was an
underprivileged stepchild of Byzantine and then Turkish despotism,
and the consequences of this unhappy geographic fate echo to this day
in the form of rampant tax evasion, a fundamental lack of
competitiveness, and paternalistic coffeehouse politics.
As for the strategic challenge posed to the West by China, we
would do well not to focus too single-mindedly on economics and
politics. Geography provides a wider lens. China is big in one sense:
its population, its commercial and energy enterprises and its economy
as a whole are creating zones of influence in contiguous parts of the
Russian Far East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. But Chinese
leaders themselves often see their country as relatively small and
fragile: within its borders are sizable minority populations of
Tibetans in the southwest, Uighur Turks in the west and
ethnic-Mongolians in the north.
It is these minority areas—high plateaus virtually encircling
the ethnic core of Han Chinese—where much of China's fresh water,
hydrocarbons and other natural resources come from. The West blithely
tells the Chinese leadership to liberalize their political system.
But the Chinese leaders know their own geography. They know that
democratization in even the mildest form threatens to unleash ethnic
fury.
Because ethnic minorities in China live in specific regions, the
prospect of China breaking apart is not out of the question. That is
why Beijing pours Han immigrants into the big cities of Tibet and
western Xinjiang province, even as it hands out small doses of
autonomy to the periphery and continues to artificially stimulate the
economies there. These policies may be unsustainable, but they
emanate ultimately from a vast and varied continental geography,
which extends into the Western Pacific, where China finds itself
boxed in by a chain of U. S. naval allies from Japan to Australia. It
is for reasons of geographic realpolitik that China is determined to
incorporate Taiwan into its dominion.
In no part of the world is it more urgent for geography to inform
American policy than in the Middle East, where our various
ideological reflexes have gotten the better of us in recent years.
As advocates continue to urge intervention in Syria, it is useful
to recall that the modern state of that name is a geographic ghost of
its post-Ottoman self, which included what are now Lebanon, Jordan
and Israel. Even that larger entity was less a well-defined place
than a vague geographical expression. Still, the truncated modern
state of Syria contains all the communal divides of the old Ottoman
region. Its ethno-religious makeup since independence in
1944—Alawites in the northwest, Sunnis in the central corridor,
Druze in the south—make it an Arab Yugoslavia in the making. These
divisions are what long made Syria the throbbing heart of pan-Arabism
and the ultimate rejectionist state vis-à-vis Israel. Only by
appealing to a radical Arab identity beyond the call of sect could
Syria assuage the forces that have always threatened to tear the
country apart.
But this does not mean that Syria must now descend into anarchy,
for geography has many stories to tell. Syria and Iraq both have deep
roots in specific agricultural terrains that hark back millennia,
making them less artificial than is supposed. Syria could yet survive
as a 21st-century equivalent of early 20th-century Beirut, Alexandria
and Smyrna: a Levantine world of multiple identities united by
commerce and anchored to the Mediterranean. Ethnic divisions based on
geography can be overcome, but only if we first recognize how
formidable they are.
Finally, there is the problem of Iran, which has vexed American
policy makers since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The U.S. tends to
see Iranian power in ideological terms, but a good deal can be
learned from the country's formidable geographic advantages.
The state of Iran conforms with the Iranian plateau, an
impregnable natural fortress that straddles both oil-producing
regions of the Middle East: the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea.
Moreover, from the western side of the Iranian plateau, all roads are
open to Iraq down below. And from the Iranian plateau's eastern and
northeastern sides, all roads are open to Central Asia, where Iran is
building roads and pipelines to several former Soviet republics.
Geography puts Iran in a favored position to dominate both Iraq
and western Afghanistan, which it does nicely at the moment. Iran's
coastline in the Persian Gulf's Strait of Hormuz is a vast 1,356
nautical miles long, with inlets perfect for hiding swarms of small
suicide-attack boats. But for the presence of the U.S. Navy, this
would allow Iran to rule the Persian Gulf. Iran also has 300 miles of
Arabian Sea frontage, making it vital for Central Asia's future
access to international waters. India has been helping Iran develop
the port of Chah Bahar in Iranian Baluchistan, which will one day be
linked to the gas and oil fields of the Caspian basin.
Iran is the geographic pivot state of the Greater Middle East, and
it is essential for the United States to reach an accommodation with
it. The regime of the ayatollahs descends from the Medes, Parthians,
Achaemenids and Sassanids of yore—Iranian peoples all—whose
sphere of influence from the Syrian desert to the Indian subcontinent
was built on a clearly defined geography.
There is one crucial difference, however: Iran's current
quasi-empire is built on fear and suffocating clerical rule, both of
which greatly limit its appeal and point to its eventual downfall.
Under this regime, the Technicolor has disappeared from the Iranian
landscape, replaced by a grainy black-and-white. The West should be
less concerned with stopping Iran's nuclear program than with
developing a grand strategy for transforming the regime.
In this very brief survey of the world as seen from the standpoint
of geography, I don't wish to be misunderstood: Geography is common
sense, but it is not fate. Individual choice operates within a
certain geographical and historical context, which affects decisions
but leaves many possibilities open. The French philosopher Raymond
Aron captured this spirit with his notion of "probabilistic
determinism," which leaves ample room for human agency.
But before geography can be overcome, it must be respected. Our
own foreign-policy elites are too enamored of beautiful ideas and too
dismissive of physical facts-on-the-ground and the cultural
differences that emanate from them. Successfully navigating today's
world demands that we focus first on constraints, and that means
paying attention to maps. Only then can noble solutions follow. The
art of statesmanship is about working just at the edge of what is
possible, without ever stepping over the brink.
—Mr. Kaplan is chief
geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence
firm. This article is adapted from his book, "The Revenge of
Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the
Battle Against Fate," which will be published Tuesday by Random
House.
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