The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  European leaders in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were engrossed by the so-called Eastern Question: that is, the eruptions of instability and nationalist yearnings caused by the seemingly interminable rotting-away of the Ottoman Empire. The Eastern Question was settled by the cataclysm of World War I, from which the modern Arab state system emerged, helped forged as it was by age-old geographical features and population clusters that Marshall Hodgson writes about so eloquently. But a hundred years on, the durability of that post-Ottoman state system in the heart of the Oikoumene should not be taken for granted.

  Part III

  AMERICA’S DESTINY

  Chapter XV

  BRAUDEL, MEXICO, AND GRAND STRATEGY

  The late Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1972 that no group of scholars had a more “fertilizing effect” on the study of history than the so-called Annales group, founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and named for the Paris periodical in which they frequently published: Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale. Foremost among these Frenchmen was Fernand Braudel. In 1949, Braudel published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a work that broke new ground in historical writing by its emphasis on geography, demography, materialism, and the environment.1 Braudel brought nature itself into a work of history, thereby immeasurably enriching the discipline, as well as helping to restore geography to its proper place in academia. His massive two-volume effort is particularly impressive because he wrote much of it while a prisoner of the Germans during World War II. In Braudel’s vast tapestry of a narrative, permanent and unchanging environmental forces lead to enduring historical trends that go on for many decades and centuries, so that the kinds of political events and regional wars with which we concern ourselves seem almost preordained, if not mere minutiae. It was Braudel who helps us understand how the rich forest soils of northern Europe, which required little to make an individual peasant productive, led ultimately to freer and more dynamic societies compared to those along the Mediterranean, where poorer, more precarious soils meant there was a requirement for irrigation that led, in turn, to oligarchies. Such poverty-stricken soils, combined with an uncertain, drought-afflicted climate, spurred the Greeks and Romans in search of conquest.2 In short, we delude ourselves in believing that we are completely in control of our destinies; rather, Braudel leads us to the attendant realization that the more we are aware of our limits, the more power we have to affect outcomes within them.

  Braudel’s geographical compass identifies the Mediterranean as a complex of seas near a great desert, the Sahara. Thus, he restored North Africa to prominence in Mediterranean studies, and so provided context for the mass migration of workers in our own era from the Mediterranean’s southern Islamic shores (upon whose stony massifs Latin sank few roots) to its northern Christian ones. Braudel’s story, despite its emphasis on the Spanish ruler Philip II, is not really one of individual men overcoming obstacles, but rather of men and their societies subtly molded by impersonal and deeply structural forces. In an era of climate change, of warming Arctic seas opening up to commercial traffic, of potential sea-level rises that spell disaster for crowded, littoral countries in the tropical Third World, and of world politics being fundamentally shaped by the availability of oil and other commodities, Braudel’s epic of geographical determinism is ripe for reading. In fact, Braudel with his writings about the Mediterranean establishes the literary mood-context for an era of scarcity and environmentally driven events in an increasingly water-starved, congested planet.

  The achievement of Braudel and the others of the Annales school, Trevor-Roper writes, “is to have drawn geography, sociology, law, ideas into the broad stream of history, and thereby to have refreshed, nourished, and strengthened that stream.” After all, Trevor-Roper goes on: “Geography, climate, population determine communications, economy, political organization.”3 Braudel, who unlike Mackinder, Spykman, or Mahan lacks a specific theory of geopolitics for us to investigate, nevertheless achieves something greater. For he is more than a geographer or strategist. He is a historian whose narrative has a godlike quality in which every detail of human existence is painted against the canvas of natural forces. If geography ever approaches literature, it does so with Braudel. In a sense, he is a summation of all the strategic thinkers we have encountered thus far.

  Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes that perhaps Braudel’s signal contribution to the way in which history is perceived is his concept of “varying wavelengths of time.” At the base is the longue durée: slow, imperceptibly changing geographical time, “of landscapes that enable and constrain.” Above this, at a faster wavelength, come the “medium-term cycles,” what Braudel himself refers to as conjonctures, that is, systemic changes in demographics, economics, agriculture, society, and politics. Cunliffe explains that these are essentially “collective forces, impersonal and usually restricted in time to no more than a century.” Together the longue durée and conjonctures provide the largely hidden “basic structures” against which human life is played out. My very highlighting of geography has been designed to put emphasis on these basic structures. Braudel calls the shortest-term cycle l’histoire événmentielle—the daily vicissitudes of politics and diplomacy that are the staple of media coverage. Braudel’s analogy is the sea: in the deepest depths is the sluggish movement of water masses that bear everything; above that the tides and swells; and finally at the surface, in Cunliffe’s words, “the transient flecks of surf, whipped up and gone in a minute.”4

  It is impossible to speculate on how geopolitics will play out over the inhuman timeframe of much of Braudel’s analysis, especially given the controversy over climate change and its effects on specific regions. To talk about relations between, say, America and Europe a hundred or two hundred years hence is ridiculous, because of so many factors that have yet to even appear. Rather, think of Braudel as simply encouraging us to take a more distant and dispassionate view of our own foibles. For example, reading Braudel, with the events of the first decade of the twenty-first century uppermost in one’s mind, it is impossible to avoid the question: Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan transient flecks of surf only; or are they part of something deeper, more profound, and structural in America’s destiny? For that matter, might World War I and World War II even, which saw violence on a scale never before experienced in history, belong merely to l’histoire événmentielle? Braudel, precisely because he places the events of humankind against the pressure of natural forces, facilitates thinking in terms of the longue durée.

  I offer up Braudel as prologue to a remarkable moment at a Washington conference in June 2009, where a question was raised that gives particular urgency to my inquiry on the relevance of geography for the United States in the twenty-first century. It was a question that Braudel would have liked, taking people away from the obsessions of the moment toward a grander and longer-term perspective. The event was sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, where I am a senior fellow. The circumstance was a panel discussion on what were the next steps that needed to be taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a special emphasis on the fine-tuning of counterinsurgency. Panelists proceeded to engage the inside baseball of “Af-Pak,” as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region has come to be addressed by the Washington cognoscenti. Then another panelist, Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, made an impolite observation, which I—sitting in the front row—will paraphrase:

  A historian looking at this panel from the viewpoint of the distant future might conclude, Bacevich surmised, that while the United States was deeply focused on Afghanistan and other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state failure was developing right on America’s southern border, with far more profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and American power than anything occurring half a world away. What have we achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the 1980s? Bacevich asked. Wh
y not fix Mexico instead? How we might have prospered had we put all that money, expertise, and innovation that went into Iraq and Afghanistan into Mexico.

  Therein, sheathed in a simple question, lies the most elemental critique of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War: a critique that, as we shall see, goes far beyond Mexico, encompasses Eurasia, and yet is rooted in North American geography. I start with Bacevich only because his frustration is stark and his bona fides particularly impressive—and poignant: a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, his son was killed in Iraq. But whereas Bacevich in his books can be a polemicist with overwhelming disregard for East Coast elites and all manner of entanglements in which they embroil America overseas, there are others whose views substantially dovetail with his. Their analysis, along with Bacevich’s, is above all rooted in a conscious attempt to get beyond l’histoire événmentielle to the longer term. When I think about what truly worries all of these analysts, Braudel’s longue durée comes to mind.

  Bacevich along with Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Paul Pillar, Mark Helprin, Ted Galen Carpenter, and the late Samuel Huntington are not, in every case, the most well-known voices in foreign policy analysis, and putting them in the same category is itself a bit of a stretch. Yet in a composite sense they have questioned the fundamental direction of American foreign policy for the longer term. Walt is a professor at Harvard and Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, but with all the prestige which those appointments carry, their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, published in 2007, came in for very rough treatment because of its allegation that Israel’s supporters in America were essentially the culprits behind the Iraq War, a war which everyone in this group of analysts was dead-set against; or against how it was fought. Helprin, a novelist and former Israeli soldier, takes no prisoners in his belief that China will be America’s primary military adversary, a belief that Mearsheimer also shares. They both, along with Pillar, a former CIA analyst, remain in high dudgeon about the diversion of American resources to useless wars in the Middle East while China acquires the latest defense technology. Indeed, even if we do stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, China will be the main beneficiary, able to build roads and pipelines throughout the region as part of its quest for energy and strategic minerals and metals. Meanwhile, Carpenter warns severely about the danger that a violence-plagued Mexico represents; as did Huntington in his last years. To merge their thoughts, as well as those of others I could name, all of whom dwell more or less in the realist camp of foreign policy circles, is to reach the conclusion that America faces three primary geopolitical dilemmas: a chaotic Eurasian heartland in the Middle East, a rising and assertive Chinese superpower, and a state in deep trouble in Mexico. And the challenges we face with China and Mexico are most efficiently dealt with by wariness of further military involvement in the Middle East. This is the only way that American power can sustain itself for the decades to come, and survive part of the longue durée.

  Of course, there is safety, a certain smugness for that matter, in such long-term thinking. None of these men has adequately addressed what, for instance, would actually happen if we were to withdraw precipitously, say, from Afghanistan. Would the intelligence that has led to successful drone attacks on al Qaeda in Waziristan dry up? Would Ayman al-Zawahiri and other surviving luminaries of al Qaeda make triumphal entries in front of al Jazeera television cameras into Jalalabad? Would Afghanistan become a radicalized Taliban state under the tutelage of Pakistani intelligence? Would India, the global pivot state of the twenty-first century, lose respect for the United States as a consequence? Would Iran informally annex western Afghanistan? And what would have happened to Iraq had we withdrawn completely in 2006, at the height of the violence there, as some of these analysts would have no doubt wished? Would the Balkan-level sectarian atrocities have soared to the level of Rwanda, with a million killed rather than a hundred or two hundred thousand? For one would have to be particularly cold-blooded not to realize the monumental effect on individual lives in such different outcomes. Moreover, what would have happened in the region, and to America’s reputation for power, had we so withdrawn? How would such quick withdrawals be carried out? Don’t ever say that things cannot get much worse than they are, because they can.

  Truly, withdrawing precipitously from Iraq or Afghanistan would be irresponsible because—like it or not—merely by invading these places and staying there so long, we have acquired substantial stakes in the outcomes. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to judge these analysts and others who agree with them solely on the minutiae of Iraq and Afghanistan. For the wellspring of emotion behind their beliefs is that we never should have gotten involved in these countries in the first place. No matter how Iraq eventually turns out, the body count, both American and Iraqi, will haunt American foreign policy debates for decades, just as Vietnam did. They constitute more than just l’histoire événmentielle.

  To be sure, these analysts are not concerned about what to do next in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead—again, merging their thoughts—they are asking themselves, what has been the cost of our blunders already? Can we as a great power be salvaged? And where do we put our best efforts, in terms of highly selective military deployments and civilian aid, so that America can help preserve the balance of power in Eurasia and not be inundated over the decades by Mexicans fleeing a troubled state? As Jakub Grygiel puts it: “Geographic isolation is a strategic blessing and should not be squandered by an expansionary strategy.”5

  So how much have we squandered already? Michael Lind, a scholar at the New America Foundation in Washington, agrees with Bacevich about the foolishness of both the Iraq War and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. But he parts company with Bacevich on whether America can afford such conflicts. Lind argues that relatively little of the national debt is the result of military spending, let alone of two simultaneous wars, and that reducing health care costs is far more central to America’s fiscal solvency than recent imperial-like adventurism, as much as he opposes it.6 In fact, a look at some of the blunders of empires past may put the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan in some perspective, both in terms of their effect on U.S. foreign policy already, and their effect on our ability to deal with the future challenges in the Middle East, China, and Mexico throughout the course of the twenty-first century.

  In 1449, returning from a failed campaign in Mongolia, the army of Ming China was surrounded by Mongol forces. Without water, the Chinese panicked. Trusting in Mongol mercy, Grygiel writes, “many shed their armor and ran toward the enemy lines.” As many as half a million Chinese soldiers were slaughtered and the Ming emperor became a prisoner of the Mongols. The Ming army adventure in Mongolia marked the start of the long decline of the Ming Dynasty. The Ming army never again attempted to confront the Mongols in the northern steppe, even as tension with the Mongols would sap the energy of the Ming leadership. This led to China’s retreat from maritime Asia, which would help encourage the entry of European powers into the Rimland.7

  Nothing so disastrous has occurred following the America adventure in Iraq—our military and economic position around the world, and especially in East Asia, is sturdy and shows no signs of retrenchment, let alone retreat. We lost under 5,000 troops and 32,000 seriously wounded, a terrible price, but not an entire invasion force of half a million. The U.S. Army, which bore the brunt of the Iraq fighting, stands at almost half a million active-duty personnel, and precisely because of its experience in irregular warfare in Iraq is now better trained, doctrinally more flexible, and intellectually more subtle than ever. The same goes for the Marine Corps.

  Not in Iraq, nor in Afghanistan, did the United States make the kind of pivotal blunder that late medieval Venice did. It wasn’t only Venice’s privileged geographical position between western and eastern Mediterranean trade routes that allowed it to create a seaborne empire; rather, it was the fact that Venice was protected from the Italian mainland by a few miles of water, and protected by invasion from
the sea by long sandbars. One cause of Venice’s decline starting in the fifteenth century was its decision to become a power on mainland Italy. By going to war repeatedly against Verona, Padua, Florence, Milan, and the League of Cambrai, Venice was no longer detached from “deadly” balance-of-power politics on land, and this had an adverse effect on its ability to project sea power.8 The Venetian example should cause alarm among American policymakers if—and only if—the United States were to make a habit of military interventions on land in the Greater Middle East. But if America can henceforth restrict itself to being an air and sea power, it can easily avoid Venice’s fate. It is the permanence of small wars that can undo us, not the odd, once every third of a century miscalculation, however much tragedy and consternation that causes.

  In this light, Iraq during the worst fighting in 2006 and 2007 might be compared to the Indian Mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the orientalists and other pragmatists in the British power structure, who wanted to leave traditional India as it was, lost some sway to evangelical and utilitarian reformers who wanted to modernize and Christianize India—to make it more like England. But the attempt to bring the fruits of Western civilization to the Indian Subcontinent were met with a revolt against imperial authority. Delhi, Luknow, and other cities were besieged and captured before being retaken by colonial forces. Yet the debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded even for another century. Instead, it signaled the transition from an ad hoc imperium fired by an evangelical lust to impose its values to a calmer and more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.9