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The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate Paperback – September 10, 2013
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In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland.
Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage.
A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
- Publication dateSeptember 10, 2013
- Dimensions7.76 x 5.08 x 0.44 inches
- ISBN-109780812982220
- ISBN-13978-0812982220
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“Robert D. Kaplan, the world-traveling reporter and intellectual whose fourteen books constitute a bedrock of penetrating exposition and analysis on the post-Cold War world . . . strips away much of the cant that suffuses public discourse these days on global developments and gets to a fundamental reality: that geography remains today, as it has been throughout history, one of the most powerful drivers of world events.”—The National Interest
“Kaplan plunges into a planetary review that is often thrilling in its sheer scale . . . encyclopedic.”—The New Yorker
“[The Revenge of Geography] serves the facts straight up. . . . Kaplan’s realism and willingness to face hard facts make The Revenge of Geography a valuable antidote to the feel-good manifestoes that often masquerade as strategic thought.”—The Daily Beast
“[A] remarkable new book . . . With such books as Balkan Ghosts and Monsoon, Kaplan, an observer of world events who sees what others often do not, has already established himself as one of the most discerning geopolitical writers of our time. The Revenge of Geography cements his status.”—National Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Kaplan / REVENGE GEOGRAPHY
Chapter I
FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD
To recover our sense of geography, we first must fix the moment in recent history when we most profoundly lost it, explain why we lost it, and elucidate how that affected our assumptions about the world. Of course, such a loss is gradual. But the moment I have isolated, when that loss seemed most acute, was immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Though an artificial border whose crumbling should have enhanced our respect for geography and the relief map—and what that map might have foreshadowed in the adjacent Balkans and the Middle East—the Berlin Wall’s erasure made us blind to the real geographical impediments that still divided us, and still awaited us.
For suddenly we were in a world in which the dismantling of a man-made boundary in Germany had led to the assumption that all human divisions were surmountable; that democracy would conquer Africa and the Middle East as easily as it had Eastern Europe; that globalization—soon to become a buzzword—was nothing less than a moral direction of history and a system of international security, rather than what it actually was, merely an economic and cultural stage of development. Consider: a totalitarian ideology had just been vanquished, even as domestic security in the United States and Western Europe was being taken for granted. The semblance of peace reigned generally. Presciently capturing the zeitgeist, a former deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Francis Fukuyama, published an article a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, “The End of History,” proclaiming that while wars and rebellions would continue, history in a Hegelian sense was over now, since the success of capitalist liberal democracies had ended the argument over which system of government was best for humankind.1 Thus, it was just a matter of shaping the world more in our own image, sometimes through the deployment of American troops; deployments that in the 1990s would exact relatively little penalty. This, the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War, was an era of illusions. It was a time when the words “realist” and “pragmatist” were considered pejoratives, signifying an aversion to humanitarian intervention in places where the national interest, as conventionally and narrowly defined, seemed elusive. Better in those days to be a neoconservative or liberal internationalist, who were thought of as good, smart people who simply wanted to stop genocide in the Balkans.
Such a burst of idealism in the United States was not unprecedented. Victory in World War I had unfurled the banner of “Wilsonianism,” a notion associated with President Woodrow Wilson that, as it would turn out, took little account of the real goals of America’s European allies and even less account of the realities of the Balkans and the Near East, where, as events in the 1920s would show, democracy and freedom from the imperial overlordship of the Ottoman Turks meant mainly heightened ethnic awareness of a narrow sort in the individual parts of the old sultanate. It was a similar phenomenon that followed the West’s victory in the Cold War, which many believed would simply bring freedom and prosperity under the banners of “democracy” and “free markets.” Many suggested that even Africa, the poorest and least stable continent, further burdened with the world’s most artificial and illogical borders, might also be on the brink of a democratic revolution; as if the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the heart of Europe held supreme meaning for the world’s least developed nations, separated by sea and desert thousands of miles away, but connected by television.2 Yet, just as after World War I and World War II, our victory in the Cold War would usher in less democracy and global peace than the next struggle for survival, in which evil would wear new masks.
Democracy and better government would, in fact, begin to emerge in Africa of all places. But it would be a long and difficult struggle, with anarchy (in the cases of several West African countries), insurrection, and outright wickedness (in the case of Rwanda) rearing their heads for considerable periods in between. Africa would go a long way toward defining the long decade between November 9, 1989, and September 11, 2001—between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the al Qaeda attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center: a twelve-year period that saw mass murder and belated humanitarian interventions frustrate idealist intellectuals, even as the ultimate success of those interventions raised idealist triumphalism to heights that were to prove catastrophic in the decade that began after 9/11.
In that new decade following 9/11, geography, a factor certainly in the Balkans and Africa in the 1990s, would go on to wreak unmitigated havoc on America’s good intentions in the Near East. The journey from Bosnia to Baghdad, from a limited air and land campaign in the western, most developed part of the former Turkish Empire in the Balkans to a mass infantry invasion in the eastern, least developed part in Mesopotamia, would expose the limits of liberal universalism, and in the process concede new respect to the relief map.
The Post Cold War actually began in the 1980s, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, with the revival of the term “Central Europe,” later defined by the journalist and Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash as “a political-cultural distinction against the Soviet ‘East.’ ”3 Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, was more of an idea than a fact of geography. It constituted a declaration of memory: that of an intense, deliciously cluttered, and romantic European civilization, suggestive of cobblestone streets and gabled roofs, of rich wine, Viennese cafés, and classical music, of a gentle, humanist tradition infused with edgy and disturbing modernist art and thought. It conjured up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and such names as Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, and Sigmund Freud, leavened with a deep appreciation of the likes of Immanuel Kant and the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Indeed, “Central Europe,” among so many other things, meant the endangered intellectual world of Jewry before the ravages of Nazism and communism; it meant economic development, with a sturdy recall of Bohemia, prior to World War II, as having enjoyed a higher level of industrialization than Belgium. It meant, with all of its decadence and moral imperfections, a zone of relative multiethnic tolerance under the umbrella of a benign if increasingly dysfunctional Habsburg Empire. In the last phase of the Cold War, Central Europe was succinctly captured by Princeton professor Carl E. Schorske in his troubling, icy-eyed classic Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, and by the Italian writer Claudio Magris in his sumptuous travelogue Danube. For Magris, Mitteleuropa is a sensibility that “means the defence of the particular against any totalitarian programme.” For the Hungarian writer György Konrád and the Czech writer Milan Kundera, Mitteleuropa is something “noble,” a “master-key” for liberalizing political aspirations.4
To speak of “Central Europe” in the 1980s and 1990s was to say that a culture in and of itself comprised a geography every bit as much as a mountain range did, or every bit as much as Soviet tanks did. For the idea of Central Europe was a rebuke to the geography of the Cold War, which had thrown up the term “Eastern Europe” to denote the half of Europe that was communist and controlled from Moscow. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary had all been part of Central Europe, it was rightly argued, and therefore should not have been consigned to the prison of nations that was communism and the Warsaw Pact. A few years later, ironically, when ethnic war broke out in Yugoslavia, “Central Europe,” rather than a term of unification, would also become one of division; with “the Balkans” dismembered in people’s minds from Central Europe, and becoming, in effect, part of the new/old Near East.
The Balkans were synonymous with the old Turkish and Byzantine empires, with unruly mountain ranges that had hindered development, and with a generally lower standard of living going back decades and centuries compared to the lands of the former Habsburg and Prussian empires in the heart of Europe. During the monochrome decades of communist domination, Balkan countries such as Romania and Bulgaria did, in fact, suffer a degree of poverty and repression unknown to the northern, “Central European” half of the Soviet Empire. The situation was complicated, of course. East Germany was the most truly occupied of the satellite states, and consequently its communist system was among the most rigid, even as Yugoslavia—not formally a member of the Warsaw Pact—allowed a degree of freedom, particularly in its cities, that was unknown in Czechoslovakia, for example. And yet, overall, the nations of former Turkish and Byzantine southeastern Europe suffered in their communist regimes nothing less than a version of oriental despotism, as though a second Mongol invasion, whereas those nations of former Catholic Habsburg Europe mainly suffered something less malignant: a dreary mix in varying degrees of radical socialist populism. In this regard traveling from relatively liberal, albeit communist, Hungary under János Kádár to Romania under the totalitarianism of Nicolae Ceau˛sescu was typical in this regard. I made the trip often in the 1980s: as my train passed into Romania from Hungary, the quality of the building materials suddenly worsened; officials ravaged my luggage and made me pay a bribe for my typewriter; the toilet paper in the lavatory disappeared and lights went dim. True, the Balkans were deeply influenced by Central Europe, but they were just as influenced by the equally proximate Middle East. The dusty steppe with its bleak public spaces—imports both from Anatolia—were a feature of life in Kosovo and Macedonia, where the cultured conviviality of Prague and Budapest was harder to find. Thus, it was not altogether an accident, or completely the work of evil individuals, that violence broke out in the ethnic mélange of Yugoslavia rather than, say, in the uniethnic Central European states of Hungary and Poland. History and geography also had something to do with it.
Yet by holding up Central Europe as a moral and political cynosure, rather than as a geographical one, liberal intellectuals like Garton Ash—one of the most eloquent voices of the decade—propounded a vision not only of Europe, but of the world that was inclusive rather than discriminatory. In this view, not only should the Balkans not be consigned to underdevelopment and barbarism, but neither should any place: Africa, for example. The fall of the Berlin Wall should affect not only Germany, but, rather, should unleash the dream of Central Europe writ large across the globe. This humanist approach was the essence of a cosmopolitanism that liberal internationalists and neoconservatives both subscribed to in the 1990s. Recall that before he became known for his support of the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz was a proponent of military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, in effect, joining hands with liberals like Garton Ash at the left-leaning New York Review of Books. The road to Baghdad had roots in the Balkan interventions of the 1990s, which were opposed by realists and pragmatists, even as these military deployments in the former Yugoslavia were to prove undeniably successful.
The yearning to save the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo cannot be divorced from the yearning for the restoration of Central Europe, both as a real and poignantly imagined place, that would demonstrate how, ultimately, it is morality and humanism that sanctify beauty. (Though Garton Ash himself was skeptical of the effort to idealize Central Europe, he did see the positive moral use to which such an idealization might be applied.)
The humanist writings of Isaiah Berlin captured the intellectual spirit of the 1990s. “ ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ I used to say, meaning an Isaiah Berliner,” Garton Ash wrote in a haunting memoir of his time in East Germany.5 Now that communism had been routed and Marxist utopias exposed as false, Isaiah Berlin was the perfect antidote to the trendy monistic theories that had ravished academic life for the previous four decades. Berlin, who taught at Oxford and whose life was coeval with the twentieth century, had always defended bourgeois pragmatism and “temporizing compromises” over political experimentation.6 He loathed geographical, cultural, and all other forms of determinism, refusing to consign anyone and anybody to their fate. His views, articulated in articles and lectures over a lifetime, often as a lone academic voice in the wilderness, comprised the perfect synthesis of a measured idealism that was employed both against communism and the notion that freedom and security were only for some peoples and not for others. His philosophy and the ideal of Central Europe were perfect fits.
But though Central Europe writ large, as expounded by these wise and eloquent intellectuals, was indeed a noble cause, one which should perennially play a role in the foreign policies of all Western nations as I will demonstrate, it does face a hurdle with which I am also forced to deal.
For there remains a problem with this exalted vision, an ugly fact that throughout history has often turned the concept of Central Europe into something tragic. Central Europe simply has no reality on the relief map. (Garton Ash intuited this with the title of his own article, “Does Central Europe Exist?”)7 Enter the geographical determinists, so harsh and lowering compared to the gentle voice of Isaiah Berlin: particularly the Edwardian era voice of Sir Halford J. Mackinder and his disciple James Fairgrieve, for whom the idea of Central Europe has a “fatal geographical flaw.” Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the “crush zone” that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its “oceanic interests,” and the “Eurasian Heartland with its continental outlook.” In short, strategically speaking, there is “no space” for Central Europe in the view of Mackinder and Fairgrieve.8 The celebration of Central Europe, the justifiable indulgence of it by the liberal intellectuals, the writings of Mackinder and Fairgrieve suggest, indicates a respite from geopolitics—or at least the desire for one. Yet the fall of the Berlin Wall did not—could not—end geopolitics, but merely brought it into a new phase. You cannot simply wish away the struggle of states and empires across the map.
I will explore Mackinder’s work, particularly his “Heartland” thesis, later at great length. Suffice it to say now that, expounded well over a hundred years ago, it proved remarkably relevant to the dynamics of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Stripped down to their most austere logic, the two world wars were about whether or not Germany would dominate the Heartland of Eurasia that lay to its east, while the Cold War centered on the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe—the western edge of Mackinder’s Heartland. This Soviet Eastern Europe, by the way, included in its domain East Germany, historic Prussia that is, which had traditionally been territorially motivated with an eastward, Heartland orientation; while inside NATO’s oceanic alliance was West Germany, historically Catholic, and industrially and commercially minded, oriented toward the North Sea and the Atlantic. A renowned American geographer of the Cold War period, Saul B. Cohen, argues that “the boundary zone that divides the East from West Germany . . . is one of the oldest in history,” the one which separated Frankish and Slavonic tribes in the Middle Ages. In other words, there was little artificial about the frontier between West and East Germany. West Germany, according to Cohen, was a “remarkable reflection of Maritime Europe,” whereas East Germany belonged to the “Continental Landpower Realm.” Cohen supported a divided Germany as “geopolitically sound and strategically necessary,” because it stabilized the perennial battle between Maritime and Heartland Europe.9 Mackinder, too, wrote presciently in 1919 that “the line through Germany . . . is the very line which we have on other grounds taken as demarking the Heartland in a strategical sense from the Coastland.”10 So while the division of Berlin itself was artificial, the division of Germany was less so.
Cohen called Central Europe a “mere geographical expression that lacks geopolitical substance.”11 The reunification of Germany, according to this logic, rather than lead to the rebirth of Central Europe, would simply lead to a renewed battle for Europe and, by inference, for the Heartland of Eurasia: Which way, in other words, would Germany swing, to the east and toward Russia, with great consequences for Poland, Hungary, and the other former satellite countries; or to the west and toward the United Kingdom and the United States, providing a victory for the Maritime realm? We still do not know the answer to this because the Post Cold War is still in its early stages. Cohen and others could not have foreseen accurately the “debellicized” nature of today’s united Germany, with its “aversion to military solutions” existing at a deep cultural level, something which in the future may help stabilize or destabilize the continent, depending upon the circumstances.12 Precisely because they have occupied the center of Europe as a land power, Germans have always demonstrated a keen awareness of geography and strategy as a survival mechanism. This is something which Germans may yet recover, allowing them to move beyond the quasi-pacifism of the moment. Indeed, might a reunited and liberal Germany become a balancing power in its own right—between the Atlantic Ocean and the Eurasian Heartland—permitting a new and daring interpretation of Central European culture to take root, and thus providing the concept of Central Europe with geopolitical ballast? That would give those like Garton Ash credence over Mackinder and Cohen.
In sum, will Central Europe, as an ideal of tolerance and high civilization, survive the onslaught of new great power struggles? For such struggles in the heart of Europe there will be. The vibrant culture of late-nineteenth-century Central Europe that looked so inviting from the vantage point of the late twentieth century was itself the upshot of an unsentimental and specific imperial and geopolitical reality, namely Habsburg Austria. Liberalism ultimately rests on power: a benign power, perhaps, but power nevertheless.
But humanitarian interventionists in the 1990s were not blind to power struggles; nor in their eyes did Central Europe constitute a utopian vision. Rather, the restoration of Central Europe through the stoppage of mass killing in the Balkans was a quiet and erudite rallying cry for the proper employment of Western military force, in order to safeguard the meaning of victory in the Cold War. After all, what was the Cold War ultimately about, except to make the world safe for individual freedom? “For liberal internationalists Bosnia has become the Spanish Civil War of our era,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, the intellectual historian and biographer of Isaiah Berlin, referring to the passion with which intellectuals like himself approached the Balkans.13
The call for human agency—and the defeat of determinism—was urgent in their minds. One recalls the passage from Joyce’s Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom laments the “generic conditions imposed by natural” law: the “decimating epidemics,” the “catastrophic cataclysms,” and “seismic upheavals.” To which Stephen Dedalus responds by simply, poignantly affirming “his significance as a conscious rational animal.”14 Yes, atrocities happen, it is the way of the world. But it doesn’t have to be accepted thus. Because man is rational, he ultimately has the ability to struggle against suffering and injustice.
And so, with Central Europe as the lodestar, the road led southeastward, first to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and onward to Baghdad. Of course, many of the intellectuals who supported intervention in Bosnia would oppose it in Iraq—or at least be skeptical of it; but neoconservatives and others would not be deterred. For as we shall see, the Balkans showed us a vision of interventionism, delayed though it was, that cost little in soldiers’ lives, leaving many with the illusion that painless victory was now the future of war. The 1990s, with their belated interventions were, as Garton Ash wrote searingly, reminiscent of W. H. Auden’s “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s.15 True, but in another sense they were much too easy.
Product details
- ASIN : 0812982223
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 10, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780812982220
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812982220
- Item Weight : 4.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.76 x 5.08 x 0.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #108,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #34 in Historical Geography
- #86 in Human Geography (Books)
- #633 in International & World Politics (Books)
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About the author
Robert David Kaplan (born June 23, 1952 in New York City) is an American author of many books on politics primarily foreign affairs and travel, whose work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
His more controversial essays about the nature of US power have spurred debate and criticism in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. One of Kaplan's most influential articles include "The Coming Anarchy", published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1994. Critics of the article has compared it to Huntingon's Clash of Civilizations thesis, since Kaplan presents conflicts in the contemporary world as the struggle between primitivism and civilizations. Another frequent theme in Kaplan's work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War.
From March 2008 to spring 2012, Kaplan was a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, which he rejoined in 2015. Between 2012 and 2014, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a private global forecasting firm. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the United States Department of Defense. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers."
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Rosalie Bolender [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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His main argument is this: Geography is prime. Geography doesn't just refer to a country's size and its location on the globe -- ultimately, it refers to a people's access to food, security, and shelter: the abundance of resources a nation possesses, the opportunity it has to harvest and harness these resources, and how forcefully it can protect itself while menacing others.
And that's why the United States is king right now. Echoing de Tocqueville's analysis without actually mentioning him, Kaplan argues that the United States' bountiful resources, temperate climate, and security guaranteed by two oceans has helped turn it into history's greatest hegemon.
Geography is also why nations that have been relevant historically are still relevant today. Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran, and Turkey are all heirs to great empires and cultures made so by their geographical fortune, and they will be forever part of the geo-political landscape. That's why, in Kaplan's analysis, the United States must engage rather than contain these powers, especially in the cases of China, Iran, and Turkey.
Because of China's sudden geo-political and socio-economic rise, it's becoming a bully in the South China Sea, but it's a bully because it has yet to discover the trappings of power and because of its insecurity (it's surrounded by historical enemies -- Russia, India, and Japan -- on all sides). There will probably be an economic "correction" and great political instability in China in the next few years, but in the long-term China will only grow to challenge United States hegemony. But Kaplan is optimistic here: It's in the best interest of both nations to control the sea lanes to facilitate trade, and China and the United States have no real geo-political conflicts with each other (which is not the case between China and Russia).
Then there's Iran and Turkey. While they're Muslim countries, Kaplan argues that both set themselves apart with their cultural legacy and brilliance. It's the error of the United States to attempt to contain or blockade Iran, and to deny Turkey membership into NATO. Iran is too geographically important (it controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which most of the world's petroleum travels) to ignore or deter -- and with American support and engagement it could very well become a democracy, a political event that would forever change the Middle East (in a way that America's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq did not).
Kaplan has strong criticisms of America, which he believes is too focused on overseas adventures to take seriously the threat down south: Mexico. Mexico's continuing failure as a state portends political problems within America: Demographers believe that by 2050 one-third of all Americans will speak Spanish, with the majority of Spanish speakers coming from Mexico. This would not only create domestic turmoil, but also hamper America's ability to use its immigration laws to pilfer the world's best and brightest. In the short-term and in the long-term, America is better off using its incredible resources and talent to help avert crisis in Mexico, and turn it into a stable democracy.
Even after three decades of writing on geo-political issues, Kaplan continues to surprise and delight with this breadth of knowledge and experience, and his willingness to challenge conventional thinking by first challenging his own.
Mugged by Geography
An old saw has it that a neo-conservative is a liberal mugged by reality. And, to paraphrase, a neo-conservative becomes a realist because he is mugged by geography. When? It happens soon after "the end of history" in the wake of 1989, rendering geography allegedly obsolete with a little help from modern technology. And so the airpower of Gulf War One putatively liberates us from the shackles of distance and terrain. But then the Balkans blow up and the Twin Towers collapse. We are back in Iraq after 9/11 and "it is surely wrong to suggest that physical terrain no longer mattered" (p. 22). Suddenly, geography is back with a vengeance. "Geography constitutes the very facts about international affairs that are so basic we take them for granted" (p. 30). And it is our permanent thing in the battle for power. "Geopolitics and the competition for `space' is eternal" (p. 88). The objective now is therefore "to have an appreciation of the map so that, counterintuitively, we need not always be bounded by it" (p. 29) for "I wish to argue for a modest acceptance of fate, secured ultimately in the facts of geography, in order to curb excessive zeal in foreign policy, a zeal of which I myself have been guilty" (p. 36).
Thus, the newly minted realist develops a vision. A global "Mittleeuropa writ large" shall arise, "an ideal of tolerance and high civilization," according to a liberal dream of Friedrich List and Timothy Garton Ash (p. 11). This will be apparently a worldwide community of liberal democracy triumphant, not to be confused with an artificial construct like "the super-state of the European Union [which] has only abstract meaning to all but the elite" (p. 48). Meanwhile, the United States shall continue to fade. No longer a hegemonic hyperpower, America can continue to dominate regionally, but only if it "fixes" Mexico. Yet, even if it avoids a calamitous ending, it shall dissolve into a federation of gargantuan city-states, horizontally integrating the union and, thus, maintaining the balance of power in Eurasia. "A world balanced is a world free" (p. 346). Yet, "the world will be both duller and more dangerous than ever before" (p. 128). This, at least, is the latest geopolitical vision of the globetrotting declineist Robert Kaplan. An aspiring master of a "closed system" (p. 73), the author conceptualizes the globe as a single cohesive unit. It is a tempting simplification, but no, thanks, in particular if it leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy of America's collapse.
Granted, all things human end. America will too. But its demise is far off. And so is Kaplan's prediction. Or is it? Ultimately, the Lord only knows. But, perhaps, others can divine with some accuracy. Thus, the author treats us to Mackinder, Mahan, Ratzel, Spykman, Strausz-Hupé, and a whole parade of other strategic giants long forgotten, undeservedly, because of the association of their grand schemes with sexy intellectual fashions of yore, now recognized as noxious determinism, militarism, racism, social Darwinism, and so forth. Yet, let us remember that "geography informs, rather than determines. Geography, therefore, is not synonymous with fatalism. But it is, like the distribution of economic and military power themselves, a major constraint on - and instigator of - the actions of states" (p. 29). Both globalization and localism are the context. They influence one another, while the former also triggers both "conflict and cooperation" (p. 102). Further Kaplan ably marries the awesome geostrategists with the encyclopedic scholars of comparative civilizations like Toynbee, Hodgson, Lewis, and Huntington. By clinging fast to his belief in the individual's free will, the author distills their teachings to stress that "of course, geography, history, and ethnic characteristics influence but do not determine future events" (p. 36).
Qualifying his analysis thus, the modern-day neo-geostrategist makes a strong case for the utility of geopolitics in prognostication. This applies both to short and long term predictions. The former, of course, sound more plausible than the latter. It is the present and not the future that Kaplan describes when he paints vividly the menacing specter of global chaos as Third World countries, in Asia in particular, go nuclear and more nationalistic. They suffer from the "crisis of room" (p. 115). Thus, they are prone to push against each other. It is "a world of crowded megacities" and soon "a world of multidimensional brinkmanship" as nuclear crises proliferate profligately (p. 119). These areas already heave with underage males prone to radical ideologies and easily mobilized through the new media for transnational causes, religious (Islamic) fundamentalism in particular. In the future, Kaplan promises more of the same but even more intense. Asia will become a battlefield of the 21st century, just as Europe was until the mid-20th century. And "the megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography" (p. 120).
The predictions are vividly grim: "A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truth transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it... 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... It is in the megacities of Eurasia principally where crowd psychology will have its greatest geopolitical impact" (p. 122-123). Crisis management will be a daily pursuit: "With civilizations densely packed 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 calm down" (p. 127).
Operating with bold strokes of a global brush, Kaplan is predictably and overly kind to the mighty. China grapples eternally with the dilemma of core vs. periphery; so does Russia. Both are vulnerable to foreign attack. In this telling, Chinese and Russian imperialisms are mere functions of self-defense. All those foreign invasions warrant expansion. Really? How many invasions has "Russia" experienced in the past 800 years in comparison to, say, Poland? A hundred times fewer, Moscow has. "A legacy of depredations against Russia" should be taken with a generous grain of salt, except by the Mongol Empire, Napoleonic France, and the Third Reich (p. 150). That is three serious incursions in 800 years. The same osmotic logic prompts the author to embrace other aspects of imperial propaganda. In particular, Kaplan accepts everything that Moscow dubs "Russia," including historical places like Rus'. Ukraine anyone? It is pivotal only at present as an intended, and inevitable, victim of the reintegrating post-Soviet behemoth operating out of the Kremlin. "Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heartland - Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia" (p. 78). At least Kaplan got this reintegrating post-Soviet drive precisely right, despite the tendency to take at face value the standard trope of Russian imperialist apologetics.
Unlike Stratfor's George Friedman, Kaplan strangely has no room for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Is it because it would undermine his Moscow-centric paradigm of Eurasia? The Commonwealth is arguably European history's greatest secret and should be listed in the same breath with "the legacies of Prussian, Habsburg, and Byzantine and Ottoman rules [which] are still relevant" (p. 146). At least the author has a soft spot for the western post-Soviet zone. "The degree to which Central and Eastern Europe can develop a belt of prosperous and stable states from the ashes of communism will go a long way to protect Europe from Russia, and, in the process, convert the dream of a revived Mitteleuropa into reality: a dream that liberal intellectuals actually share with Mackinder" (p. 136).
Yet, the Mittleeuropa does not really exist in the Mackinderian scheme of things. Someone must control "the geographic pivot of history" so the barbarians from the East would not pour into Europe. Too bad it has to be Russia, but better the Muscovite state than "the yellow peril." Albeit unattractive, Russia is thus indispensible in Mackinder's geopolitical imagination. "In short, strategically speaking, there is `no space' for Central Europe" (p. 9). It is an artificial construct, a springboard toward a Haushoferian Lebensraum or a causeway from Asia into Europe proper, which, in itself, is just an Asian peninsula jutting toward the Atlantic Ocean. What is Europe then? It is a map in flux. It is constructed on the basis of Charlemagne's ancient realm in the West, encompassing the post-Soviet zone and even North Africa, with power increasingly shifting to Berlin. The mighty rule.
Yet, the dwarves of the world are not helpless. Kaplan rejects geographic determinism and fatalism with this valuable piece of advice: "A small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography" (p. 34). Anyone listening between Berlin and Moscow? The same applies to "the power of statelessness" (p. 126). According to the author, "small stateless groups are beneficiaries of this new age of technology" of death (p. 126-127).
Still, one rejoices that this influential neo-conservative realist restores geography to its rightful place of permanence in the global calculus of power. "Geography offers a way to make at least some sense of it all" (p. xxii). And: "Just as geography is not an explanation for everything, neither is it a solution. Geography is merely the unchanging backdrop against which the battle of ideas plays out" (p. 177). Those who ignore geography do so at their peril. But the journalist qualifies this common sense observation by allowing that "the revenge of geography" is balanced by "the defeat of geography" by technology (transport and communication revolutions in particular). Geography remains relevant but not omnipotent. Thus, in this telling, geography serves as a reality check on our designs and actions, rather than a fatalistic determinant. Impersonal forces of geography rule. But they do not rule supreme.
It is a pleasure to read Kaplan if only to revisit thinkers too long out of favor. Naturally, one cringes at some of his sentiments. For example, "there are things worse than communism," he deadpans, "and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves" (p. 21). This was not the author's preference of Stalin over Saddam, one should hope, but, rather, an awkwardly phrased confession of his appreciation for order over chaos. Yet, if chaos is counter-revolutionary, then it is better than any Communist totalitarian order which is an order of the prison, if not an outright order of the grave, as Angelo Codevilla would remark. This applies to all totalitarian regimes: For a Jew, chaos under Nazism meant hope of survival; order spelled death. One derives such knowledge from a posteriori inquiries, the essence of conservatism. We are delighted that Robert Kaplan's experience has been a corrective on his original liberal ideology. Now that the neo-geopolitician has been mugged by geography, perhaps he can be encouraged to delve into First Things, which are at the root of our understanding of the universe, including geography.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012).
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz