The Revenge of Geography (50 page)
Read The Revenge of Geography Online
Authors: Robert D. Kaplan
The quality and fluidity of this cultural and binational interaction will, arguably, more than any other individual dynamic, determine how well America interacts with Mackinder’s World-Island (Eurasia and Africa). American foreign policy will likely be both wise and unwise by turns in the course of the decades. But American economic power, cultural power, moral power, and even political and military power will be substantially affected by whether we can develop into a cohesive, bilingual supra-state-of-sorts with Mexico and Canada or, instead, become trapped by a dysfunctional, vast, and increasingly unruly border region that engenders civilizational tension between
America’s still dominant Anglo-Protestant culture and its Hispanic counterpart. Huntington’s fears are justified; it is his solution that is partly wrong.
Keep in mind that, as we know from Paul Bracken and others, the earth’s political geography increasingly constitutes a closed, claustrophobic system. Cultural and political interchanges across the seas will become more and more organic. Thus, if the United States and Mexico do not eventually come together to the degree that the U.S. and Canada already have—if we do not have Mexico as an intimate and dependable ally in world forums—it will adversely affect America’s other relationships, especially as Mexico’s (and Central America’s) population grows at a much higher rate than ours, and thus Mexico will assume more importance as time goes on. Braudel’s exploration of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean makes clear the role that natural forces like geography play over time: that is why Mexico must play a central function in any grand strategy we decide upon.
Think of the future world as roughly resembling the millet system of the old Ottoman Empire: a “network of geographically intermingled communities,” in Toynbee’s words, rather than a “patchwork of … segregated parochial states.”
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Each relationship will affect the others as never before. As we have seen, future decades will see rail, road, and pipelines connecting all of Eurasia through a Central Asian and particularly an Afghan hub. An organic and united Eurasia will demand as a balancer an organic and united North America, from the Canadian Arctic to the Central American jungles. Not to continue to deepen links with Mexico and Central America, whose combined populations account for half the population of that of the United States, would be to see Mexico and perhaps some of its southern neighbors slip into a hostile diplomatic and political orbit in a world where Eurasia will be closer than ever before. The way to guard against a pro-Iranian Venezuela and other radical states that may emerge from time to time in the Western Hemisphere is to wrap the Greater Caribbean into a zone of free trade and human migration that, perforce, would be American dominated, as Mexico’s and Central
America’s younger populations supply the labor force for America’s aging one. Of course, this is happening already, but the intensity of the human exchange will, and should, increase.
“Global war, as well as global peace,” writes Nicholas Spykman, “means that all fronts and all areas are interrelated. No matter how remote they are from each other, success or failure in one will have an immediate and determining effect on the others.”
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That is far truer today than it was in 1944 when that statement was published posthumously. It will be far truer in the future. Robert Strausz-Hupé notes, “The history of Greece is the struggle for survival against the cyclic irruptions of Asia.”
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Think of how close ancient Greece was to Persia, and one may get a sense of how close we are to Eurasia now, given the revolution in transportation and communications. Making sure that one power in the Eastern Hemisphere does not become unduly dominant, so as to threaten the United States in the Western Hemisphere, will be a much easier task if we advance unity in the Western Hemisphere in the first place.
We must be a balancing power in Eurasia and a unifying power in North America—doing both will be easier than doing just one. Preserving the balance of power, of course, must be done for a specific purpose that goes beyond the physical and economic protection of the United States. And that purpose is to use the stability guaranteed by a balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere to advance nothing less than the liberal intellectual cause of a
Mitteleuropa
writ large across the globe. Just as Stephen Dedalus affirms “his significance as a conscious rational animal,” in effect resisting fate, we must never give in to geography, but must fundamentally be aware of it in our quest for a better world. For the yearning after the Post Cold War ideal of a cosmopolitan Central Europe which informed the beginning of this study is where we are at the end of it. Whether or not that goal is achievable, it is something always worth striving for, hopefully with Mexico by our side. Mackinder intuited this in his call for vibrant and independent buffer states between Maritime Europe and the Heartland, noting that a world balanced is a world free.
TO THE MEMORY OF
HARVEY SICHERMAN
1945–2010
PRESIDENT
,
FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
,
PHILADELPHIA
The idea for this book originated in a magazine article, the impetus for which came from the editors at
Foreign Policy
, notably Christian Brose and Susan Glasser. As the book developed, a shortened version of the China chapter ran as a cover story in
Foreign Affairs
, for which I thank James F. Hoge Jr., Gideon Rose, and Stephanie Giry. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington published a paper that was a shortened version of the India chapter, for which I thank Kristen Lord, vice president and director of studies there. In fact, the book could not have been completed without the institutional support I received from CNAS, for which I thank CEO Nathaniel Fick, President John Nagl, and Director of Development Venilde Jeronimo. Sections of the Preface are adapted from several previous books of mine, as noted on the copyright page. Throughout this editorial process, help and inspiration came from Jakub Grygiel at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the
Johns Hopkins University. Other help came from Army Lieutenant General (Retired) Dave Barno, CNAS senior advisor Richard Fontaine, former CNAS researcher Seth Myers,
Atlantic
editors James Gibney and Yvonne Rolzhausen, Naval Academy professor Stephen Wrage, and Professor Brian W. Blouet of the College of William and Mary.
At Random House, my editor, Jonathan Jao, provided seasoned advice on all fronts. Kate Medina also provided encouragement. Once more, I thank my literary agents, Carl D. Brandt and Marianne Merola, for their assistance in helping to guide me from one project to another.
Elizabeth Lockyer, my assistant, worked on the maps. My wife, Maria Cabral, once again provided emotional support.
Preface: Frontiers 1.
Jeremy Black,
Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 85.
2.
James C. Scott,
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. ix.
3.
The province was later renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
4.
Sugata Bose,
A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 56.
5.
Golo Mann,
The History of Germany Since 1789
, translated by Marian Jackson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), pp. 525 and 880, 1987 Peregrine edition.
6.
Ernest Gellner,
Muslim Society
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 38, 41, 180, 187.
Chapter I: From Bosnia to Baghdad
1.
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,”
The National Interest
, Washington, Summer 1989. Book version:
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: The Free Press, 1992).
2.
Jonathan C. Randal, “In Africa, Unrest in One-Party States,”
International Herald Tribune
, Paris, March 27, 1990.
3.
Timothy Garton Ash, “Bosnia in Our Future,”
New York Review of Books
, December 21, 1995.
4.
Carl E. Schorske,
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
(New York: Knopf, 1980); Claudio Magris,
Danube
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986, 1989), p. 268.
5.
Timothy Garton Ash,
The File: A Personal History
(New York: Random House, 1997), p. 51.
6.
Michael Ignatieff,
Isaiah Berlin: A Life
(New York: Holt, 1998), p. 24.
7.
Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?,”
New York Review of Books
, October 9, 1986.
8.
W. H. Parker,
Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 201; K. A. Sinnhuber, “Central Europe–Mitteleuropa–Europe Centrale: An Analysis of a Geographical Term,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
, vol. 20, 1954; Arthur Butler Dugan, “Mackinder and His Critics Reconsidered,”
The Journal of Politics
, May 1962, p. 250.
9.
Saul B. Cohen,
Geography and Politics in a World Divided
(New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 79–83.
10.
Halford J. Mackinder,
Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction
(Washington: National Defense University, 1919, 1942), p. 90.
11.
Cohen,
Geography and Politics in a World Divided
, p. 222.
12.
Colin S. Gray,
Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 37, 95, 176–77.
13.
Michael Ignatieff, “Homage to Bosnia,”
New York Review of Books
, April 21, 1994.
14.
James Joyce,
Ulysses
(New York: Modern Library, 1922, 1934), p. 697, 1990 Vintage edition.
15. Timothy Garton Ash, “Kosovo and Beyond,”
New York Review of Books
, June 24, 1999. He was referring to a line in Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” published in 1940.
16.
Timothy Garton Ash, “Cry, the Dismembered Country,”
New York Review of Books
, January 14, 1999.
17.
I have my own history regarding the story of these delayed interventions. My book
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
(New York: St. Martin’s) was reportedly a factor in President Bill Clinton’s decision not to militarily intervene in 1993, thus putting off the dispatch of NATO forces into the Balkans for two years.
Balkan Ghosts
, a record of my experiences in the Balkans in the 1980s, appeared first as works in progress in
The Atlantic Monthly
before the Berlin Wall fell. Then, in June 1991, Chapter 3 of
Balkan Ghosts
(about Macedonia) appeared in
The Atlantic
. According to a former State Department official, quoted in
The Washington Post
(February 21, 2002), that article was instrumental in getting “the first and only preventive deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia.” Though a 1990 CIA report warned of Yugoslavia disintegrating, the State Department “was in a state of denial … until Kaplan’s article came along.” As it happens, the deployment of 1,500 peacekeepers in Macedonia prevented violence that later broke out in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Balkan Ghosts
was published in book form in March 1993. That same month I published an article about Yugoslavia in
Reader’s Digest
, in which I wrote: “Unless we can break the cycle of hatred and revenge—by standing forcefully for self-determination and minority rights—the gains from the end of the Cold War will be lost. All aid, all diplomatic efforts, all force if force is used, must be linked to the simple idea that all the people of Yugoslavia deserve freedom from violence.” Soon after, I appeared on television to publicly urge intervention in the Balkans. I also urged intervention on the front page of
The Washington Post
’s Outlook section on April 17, 1994, more than a year before we finally intervened.
Balkan Ghosts
paints a grim picture of ethnic relations in southeastern Europe, but it is only the grimmest human landscapes where intervention has usually been required in the first place: one need never idealize a human landscape in order to take action on its behalf. And as we would learn later in Iraq, when you do intervene, you should do so without illusions. Though my
books and articles were read by the president and others, at no point did anyone in the Clinton administration contact me in any way concerning my work, and how it might be applied to specific events and policy choices that arose after the book was completed.
18.
Leon Wieseltier, “Force Without Force: Saving NATO, Losing Kosovo,”
New Republic
, Washington, April 26 and May 3, 1999.
19.
Leon Wieseltier, “Winning Ugly: The War Ends, Sort Of. The Peace Begins, Sort Of,”
New Republic
, Washington, June 28, 1999.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Leon Wieseltier, “Useless,”
New Republic
, Washington, April 17, 2006.
22.
Bob Woodward,
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 84–85.
23.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer,
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
24.
Israel at the time of 9/11 was undergoing frequent terrorist attacks and so naturally was at the receiving end of American sympathy. Demands for it to freeze settlement activity in the occupied territories would resume later on, though. During the buildup to the Iraq War, I wrote that if Bush was successful in Iraq and achieved a second term, he should end “the domination by Israeli overlords of three million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” a situation which I called “particularly untenable.” “A Post-Saddam Scenario,”
Atlantic Monthly
, Boston, November 2002.
25.
Robert D. Kaplan,
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos
(New York: Random House, 2002), p. 84.
26.
Hobbes and Berlin are great precisely because of their nuance. Hobbes’s philosophy may represent a grim view of humanity, but he was also a liberal modernizer, because at the time of his writings modernization meant the breakdown of the medieval order through the establishment of a central authority, which his Leviathan represented. Likewise Berlin, while the embodiment of liberal humanism, was also a realist who recognized, for example, that the search for sufficient food and shelter came before the search for freedom.
27.
Actually, advance columns of American forces in the First Gulf War had come within 150 kilometers of Baghdad. But the bulk of the troops were based in Kuwait and the Saudi desert. Robert D. Kaplan, “Man Versus Afghanistan,”
The Atlantic
, April 2010.
