The Revenge of Geography (7 page)

Indeed, geography is the preface to the very track of human events. It is no accident that European civilization had important origins in Crete and the Cycladic islands of Greece, for the former, a “detached fragment of Europe,” is the closest European point to the civilization of Egypt, and the latter the closest point to that of Asia Minor.
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Both, because of their island situations, were for centuries protected against the ravages of invaders, allowing them to flourish. Geography constitutes the very facts about international affairs that are so basic we take them for granted.

What could be a more central fact of European history than that Germany is a continental power and Great Britain an island? Germany faces both east and west with no mountain ranges to protect it,
providing it with pathologies from militarism to nascent pacifism, so as to cope with its dangerous location. Britain, on the other hand, secure in its borders, with an oceanic orientation, could develop a democratic system ahead of its neighbors, and forge a special transatlantic relationship with the United States, with which it shares a common language. Alexander Hamilton wrote that had Britain not been an island, its military establishment would have been just as overbearing as those of continental Europe, and Britain “would in all probability” have become “a victim to the absolute power of a single man.”
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And yet Britain is an island close to continental Europe, and thus in danger of invasion through most of its history, giving it a particular strategic concern over the span of the centuries with the politics of France and the Low Countries on the opposite shore of the English Channel and the North Sea.
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Why is China ultimately more important than Brazil? Because of geographical location: even supposing the same level of economic growth as China and a population of equal size, Brazil does not command the main sea lines of communication connecting oceans and continents as China does; nor does it mainly lie in the temperate zone like China, with a more disease-free and invigorating climate. China fronts the Western Pacific and has depth on land reaching to oil- and natural-gas-rich Central Asia. Brazil offers less of a comparative advantage. It lies isolated in South America, geographically removed from other landmasses.
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Why is Africa so poor? Though Africa is the second largest continent, with an area five times that of Europe, its coastline south of the Sahara is little more than a quarter as long. Moreover, this coastline lacks many good natural harbors, with the East African ports that traded vigorously with Arabia and India constituting the exception. Few of tropical Africa’s rivers are navigable from the sea, dropping as they do from interior tableland to coastal plains by a series of falls and rapids, so that inland Africa is particularly isolated from the coast.
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Moreover, the Sahara Desert hindered human contact from the north for too many centuries, so that Africa was little exposed to the great Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity and afterward.
Then there are the great, thick forests thrown up on either side of the equator, from the Gulf of Guinea to the Congo basin, under the influence of heavy rains and intense heat.
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These forests are no friends to civilization, nor are they conducive to natural borders, and so the borders erected by European colonialists were, perforce, artificial ones. The natural world has given Africa much to labor against in its path to modernity.

Check the list of the world’s most feeble economies and note the high proportion that are landlocked.
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Note how tropical countries (those located between 23.45 degrees north and south latitudes) are generally poor, even as most high-income countries are in the middle and high latitudes. Note how temperate zone, east–west oriented Eurasia is better off than north–south oriented sub-Saharan Africa, because technological diffusion works much better across a common latitude, where climatic conditions are similar, thus allowing for innovations in the tending of plants and the domestication of animals to spread rapidly. It is no accident that the world’s poorest regions tend to be where geography, by way of soil suitability, supports high population densities, but not economic growth—because of distance from ports and railheads. Central India and inland Africa are prime examples of this.
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In a stunning summation of geographical determinism, the late geographer Paul Wheatley made the observation that “the Sanskrit tongue was chilled to silence at 500 meters,” so that Indian culture was in essence a lowland phenomenon.
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Other examples of how geography has richly influenced the fate of peoples in ways both subtle and obvious are legion, and I will get to more of them in the course of this study.

But before we move on, let me mention the example of the United States. For it is geography that has helped sustain American prosperity and which may be ultimately responsible for America’s panhumanistic altruism. As John Adams notes, “There is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.”
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The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them
“from the landbound enemies of liberty.” The militarism and pragmatism of continental Europe through the mid-twentieth century, to which the Americans always felt superior, was the result of geography, not character. Competing states and empires adjoined one another on a crowded continent. European nations could never withdraw across an ocean in the event of a military miscalculation. Thus, their foreign policies could not be grounded by a universalist morality, and they remained well armed against one another until dominated by an American hegemon after World War II.
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It wasn’t only two oceans that gave Americans the luxury of their idealism, it was also that these two oceans gave America direct access to the two principal arteries of politics and commerce in the world: Europe across the Atlantic and East Asia across the Pacific, with the riches of the American continent lying between them.
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And yet these same oceans, by separating America by thousands of miles from other continents, have given America a virulent strain of isolationism that has persisted to this day. Indeed, except in its own sphere of influence in the Americas, the United States zealously resisted great power politics for almost two hundred years: even the breakdown of the European state system in 1940 failed to bring America into World War II. It took an attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to do that. Following the war, the United States once more withdrew from the world, until the aggression of the Soviet Union and North Korea’s attack on South Korea forced its troops back to Europe and Asia.
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Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites have oscillated between quasi-isolationism and idealist-minded interventionism: all of this at root because of two oceans.

Geography “has been forgotten, not conquered,” writes the Johns Hopkins University scholar Jakub J. Grygiel.
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“That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,” writes Colin S. Gray, a longtime advisor on military strategy to the British and American governments. It is not only that, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, “the exercise of continuous influence or control requires,” in Gray’s words, “the physical presence
of armed people in the area at issue,” it is that anyone who truly believes that geography has been pivotally downgraded is profoundly ignorant of military logistics—of the science of getting significant quantities of men and matériel from one continent to another. What I had experienced in traveling with the 1st Marine Division overland through Iraq was only a small part of that logistics exercise, which included getting men and equipment thousands of miles by ship from North America to the Persian Gulf. In a strikingly clairvoyant analysis in 1999, the American military historian Williamson Murray wrote that the approaching new century would make the United States confront once again the “harsh geographic reality” imposed by two oceans, which limit and make almost insanely expensive the deployment of our ground troops to far-off locales. While some wars and rescue missions may be quickly concluded by airborne “raiding” (one thinks of the Israeli attack on Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976 to rescue hijacked plane passengers), even in those operations, terrain matters. Terrain determines the pace and method of fighting. The Falklands War of 1982 unfolded slowly because of the maritime environment, while the flat deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991 magnified the effect of air power, even as holding vast and heavily populated stretches of Iraq in the Second Gulf War showed the limits of air power and thus made American forces victims of geography: aircraft can bombard, but they cannot transport goods in bulk, nor exercise control on the ground.
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Moreover, in many cases still, aircraft require bases reasonably close by. Even in an age of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs, geography matters. As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite credibility in their nuclear threats. This means that 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.
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But to embrace the relief map along with mountains and men is not to see the world irrevocably driven by ethnic and sectarian divides
that resist globalization. The story is far more complicated than that. Globalization has itself spurred the rebirth of localisms, built in many cases on ethnic and religious consciousness, which are anchored to specific landscapes, and thus explained best by reference to the relief map. This is because the forces of mass communications and economic integration have weakened the power of many states, including artificially conceived ones averse to the dictates of geography, leaving exposed in some critical areas a fractious, tottering world. Because of communications technology, pan-Islamic movements gain strength across the entire Afro-Asian arc of Islam, even as individual Muslim states themselves are under siege from within.

Take Iraq and Pakistan, which are in terms of geography arguably the two most illogically conceived states between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Subcontinent, even as the relief map decrees Afghanistan to be a weak state at best. Yes, Iraq fell apart because the United States invaded it. But Saddam Hussein’s tyranny (which I intimately experienced in the 1980s, and was by far the worst in the Arab world), one could argue, was itself geographically determined. For every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in 1958 had to be more repressive than the previous one in order to hold together a state with no natural borders composed of Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs, seething with a well-articulated degree of ethnic and sectarian consciousness.

I realize that it is important not to go too far in this line of argument. True, the mountains that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the Mesopotamian plain between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may have been more pivotal to the turn of events than the yearning after democracy. But no one can know the future, and a reasonably stable and democratic Iraq is certainly not out of the question: just as the mountains of southeastern Europe that helped separate the Austro-Hungarian Empire from that of the poorer and less developed Ottoman Turkish one, and that helped divide ethnic and confessional groups from one another for centuries in the Balkans, certainly did not doom our interventions there to stop internecine wars. I am not talking here of an implacable
force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, 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.

The more we can curb this zeal, the more successful will be the interventions in which we do take part, and the more successful these interventions are, the more leeway our policymakers will have in the court of public opinion to act likewise in the future.

I am aware that I am on dangerous ground in raising geography on a pedestal. I will, therefore, in the course of this study, try to keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin’s admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that
vast impersonal forces
such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than the individuals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “Tradition” and “History” as “wiser than we.”
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For Berlin, the individual and his moral responsibility are paramount, and he or she cannot therefore blame his or her actions—or fate—altogether, or in great part, on such factors as landscape and culture. The motives of human beings matter very much to history; they are not illusions explained away by references to larger forces. The map is a beginning, not an end to interpreting the past and present.

Of course, geography, history, and ethnic characteristics influence but do not
determine
future events. Nevertheless, today’s foreign policy challenges simply cannot be solved, and wise choices cannot be made, without substantial reference to these very factors, which Berlin, in his sweeping attack on all forms of determinism, seems at first glance to reject. Reliance on geography and ethnic and sectarian factors could have served us well in anticipating the violence in both the Balkans, following the end of the Cold War, and in Iraq, following
the U.S. invasion of 2003. Nevertheless, Berlin’s moral challenge holds up well so far as framing the debates that have taken place in the course of the past two decades, about where and where not to deploy American troops abroad.