Book Review: The Revenge of Geography,What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate,by Robert D. Kaplan

Heartland and Rimland

When this reviewer was introduced to geopolitics as a graduate student under political scientist Charles Callan Tansill in the 1950s, the study’s sacred trinity of preachers was already Mackinder–Mahan–Spykman. Their core thesis was the interaction between the “Eurasian heartland”—now Russia and more or less the European Union—and its “Rimland” running from Iberia through North Africa and Turkey, and on to India, China, the Koreas, and Japan. Their conclusion was that the influence of geography on strategy made the planet’s topography a main determinant of how political leaders exploit the natural environment.

Two decades ago, Iraq was seen by others as a country on schedule to have its form of governance rearranged by outsiders. After having invaded an adjacent state, its leader Saddam Hussein supposedly harbored weapons of mass destruction, hidden somewhere under the sands of the desert, menacing Iraq’s neighbors and possibly beyond. Unverifiable photomaps said so. Yet maps, as Kaplan notes, “don’t always tell the truth. They are often as subjective as any fragment of prose.” These geographic charts are often assumed to be merely “materialistic, and therefore morally neutral.” (p. 27).

As early as the Berlin conference of the 1880s, which unilaterally apportioned huge tracts of Africa to expanding European colonial empires, diplomatic prose became unjustifiably deterministic. Today, political and economic turmoil on the “dark continent,” as well as continuing violations of human rights, derives directly from the greed and arbitrariness of those Berlin conferees.

Afghanistan, historically a trap for incautious military adventurers, has a topography that allows Afghans to resist successfully much more powerful conventional armies. This they did when Alexander the Great tried to conquer their mountainous redoubts in the fourth century B.C.—and when Europeans again undertook their conquest in the 1800s.

“Maps are materialistic, and therefore morally neutral.”(p. 27).

After the Taliban were removed from power in 2001–2002, they retreated further into the uplands “to stage their resistance against the new Afghan government and NATO forces” (R. Kaplan, “The Taliban’s Mountain Hideout in Afghanistan,” Stratfor, March 2013, 1, 14).

Could the globalization that characterizes our present era, if properly managed, have put the brakes on incursions by alien powers? Not necessarily, insists Kaplan, because the very act of globalization “has 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,” as he further explains, “the forces of mass communications and economic integration have weakened the power of many states.”

When geopolitician Nicholas Spykman looked, in 1942, “with anxious foresight,” beyond the widespread battle zones of the Second World War, he agonized about the implications of leaving Germany demilitarized after hostilities ended. He foresaw a Russian state that extended from the Urals to the North Sea as “no great improvement [on] a German state from the North Sea to the Urals . . . Therefore a powerful Germany will be necessary following Hitler.” Spykman recommended, furthermore, an American “postwar alliance with Japan against the continental powers of Russia and particularly a rising China.” In Kaplan’s words, the specialist in geopolitics thus strives “to describe geography as it affects history, so as to get some idea of what the future might hold.”

Everyday History and the Mexican Snare

Readers of World Future Review (WFR), typically aware as they are of history and alert to the news of the day, may wish to pass lightly over chapters IX through XIV, although the sequences on China (XI), India (XII), and Iran (XIII) should help futurists better understand the possible roles and probable future performances of these key nations. These possibilities are, in the usual Kaplan style, clearly pondered and elegantly expressed.

The final element of this book is meant especially for North American readers but is integral to the author’s overall exposition. Invoking the work of Fernand Braudel and that historian’s concentration on l’histoire évènementielle (workaday history), or “the daily vicissitudes of politics and diplomacy that are the staple of media coverage,” Kaplan deplores the fact that Americans, both in government and among the general public, have paid so little attention to the ominous evolution taking place in neighboring Mexico.

He cautions that a “massive state failure” is emerging “right on America’s southern border.” This holds “far more profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and, ultimately, for American power throughout the world, than anything occurring half a world away . . . Why not fix Mexico instead?” This, the author contends, is “a critique that goes . . . far beyond Mexico, [and that] encompasses [the whole of] Eurasia, and yet is rooted in North American geography.” And, just two pages later, he warns “Don’t ever say that things cannot become much worse than they are, because they can.”

Great powers can be, and have been, eroded by reacting militarily to annoying neighbors and historically trifling irritations. Rome, Venice, Ottoman Turkey, and the Austrian empire all paid dearly for their impatience. During the past century, the United States has riposted increasingly to situations of a similar kind, quickly putting “boots on the ground” when softer power might have proved more successful, less costly by far, and more productive of sound foreign relations. Kaplan contends that “the permanence of small wars can undo us . . . [more surely than] the odd, once every third of a century miscalculation, however much tragedy and consternation that causes.”

In his final paragraphs, Kaplan warns that drug wars, corruption, and the shortcomings resulting from ineffective policing and an unreliable judiciary in Mexico do not bode well for America’s neighbor to the south:

Vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If President Calderón and his successors can succeed in [their] mission to break the back of the drug cartels once and for all (a very difficult prospect, to say the least), then the United States will have achieved a strategic victory greater than any possible in the Middle East. A stable and prosperous Mexico, working in organic concert with the United States, would be an unbeatable combination in geopolitics.