The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

by Robert D. Kaplan

  But there is a negative flip side to much of this. Yes, the Caribbean basin unites rather than divides, and the trail of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia through Central America and Mexico to the United States shows this in action. The so-called drug war is a salient lesson in geography, which now threatens the U.S. in its hemispheric backyard. The same with the populist, anti-American radicalism of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who has been an affront to American global interests not simply because he has been allied with Russia and Iran, but because he has been allied with Russia and Iran from his perch on the Caribbean basin: were he situated below the Amazon rainforest in the Southern Cone, he would have been less of a threat. Globalization—the Information Age, the collapsing of distance, the explosion of labor migration from demographically young countries to demographically graying countries—has brought the U.S. into an uncomfortably closer relationship with an unstable Latin America around the Caribbean. Whereas the Caribbean was previously a place that the U.S. Navy dominated, but which was otherwise separated from the main currents of American society, it is now part of the very fabric of American life. Spykman’s ideas presage these developments, even as, obviously, he could not have predicted their specifics.

  Writing in the midst of World War II like Strausz-Hupé, before the fortunes of war turned in the Allies’ favor, the worldwide threat posed by the Nazis was uppermost in Spykman’s mind. Consequently, he saw the separation of the United States from southern South America as of considerable geographical importance: it was a strategic advantage in that the U.S. did not have to master the region, the way it had to master the Caribbean basin; but it was a vulnerability in that the U.S. had no special geographical advantage in the event of the region being threatened by an adversary from Europe. And the Southern Cone, from Rio de Janeiro southward—what Spykman calls the “equidistant zone”—contained the continent’s most productive agricultural regions, three-quarters of South America’s population, and the major cities of the two most important South American republics at the time, Brazil and Argentina. Even allowing for its geographic insignificance compared to Eurasia, Spykman worried about the Southern Cone becoming part of the encirclement strategy of a hostile power. Just as the geography of the Americas allowed for the emergence of the United States as a hemispheric hegemon, the breakup of the Americas into a free north and an Axis-dominated south would have spelled the end of that preponderance. “Many of the isolationists,” he writes, “accepted the policy of hemisphere defense because it seemed a way of avoiding conflict with Germany, but they overlooked the fact that, even if the U.S. could have avoided war with Germany over Europe, it could not have avoided a struggle with Germany for hegemony over South America.”8

  Even though the Axis powers were to be defeated, Spykman’s warning still stands, after a fashion. Europe, Japan, and China have made very deep inroads in trade with Spykman’s equidistant zone, and there is no guarantee that the United States will remain the dominant outside power in a region in which under 20 percent of its trade is with the U.S., and the flying time from New York to Buenos Aires is eleven hours, the same time it takes to fly from the U.S. to the Middle East. Although his obsession was with winning the war, by his single-minded focus on geography, Spykman is able to show us the world we currently inhabit.

  Spykman was a generation younger than Mackinder, deriving his frame of reference and inspiration from the English geographer. Latin America constitutes a long tangent from Spykman’s central concern about Eurasia, which he shared with Mackinder. Mackinder’s work suggests the struggle of Heartland-dominated land power versus sea power, with Heartland-based land power in the better position. Here is Spykman essentially acknowledging the spiritual influence of Mackinder—even if they assessed differently the relative importance of sea and land power:

  For two hundred years, since the time of Peter the Great, Russia has attempted to break through the encircling ring of border states and reach the ocean. Geography and sea power have persistently thwarted her.9

  Spykman describes the Heartland as vaguely synonymous with the Soviet Empire, bordered by ice-blocked Arctic seas to the north, between Norway and the Russian Far East; and to the south ringed by mountains, from the Carpathians in Romania to the plateaus of Anatolia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and turning northeastward to the Pamir Knot, the Altai Mountains, the plateau of Mongolia, and finally over to Manchuria and Korea. This to him was the world’s key geography, which would be perennially fought over. To the north and inside this belt of mountain and tableland lies the Heartland; to the south and outside this belt lie the demographic giants of Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, as well as the oil-rich Middle East. These marginal areas of Eurasia, especially their littorals, was what Spykman called the Rimland. Spykman held that the Rimland was the key to world power; not Mackinder’s Heartland, because in addition to dominating Eurasia, the maritime-oriented Rimland was central to contact with the outside world.10

  Of course, both men are really talking about the same thing; for Mackinder says that he who controls the Heartland is in the best position to capture the Rimland, which then provides through sea power the key to world domination. As Mackinder writes, “If we would take the long view, must we still not reckon with the possibility that a large part of the Great Continent might someday be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon it?” This, of course, was the dream of the Soviet Union, to advance to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean through the invasion of Afghanistan and the attempted destabilization of Pakistan in the 1980s, and thus combine sea power and land power.11

  Still, Spykman with his emphasis on the Rimland has the slight advantage here. Given the present state of the world, with Rimland upheavals in the Greater Middle East and tensions throughout South Asia, as well as the Korean Peninsula, Spykman with his concentration on the Rimland and his more complexified view of geopolitics seems almost contemporary. For the body of Mackinder’s theories emerge from the world at the turn of the twentieth century and the First World War; whereas Spykman is arguing from the facts of life of a later war, in which the Heartland was in the hands of an ally, Soviet Russia, and thus not an issue; whereas the Rimland was endangered by the Axis powers.

  While the Axis powers lost the war, the competition for the Rimland continued into the Cold War. The Soviet Union constituted the great Heartland power that threatened the Rimland in Europe, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere, and was opposed by Western sea power. Consequently, “containment,” the Cold War policy against the Soviet Union enunciated in 1946 by the diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan in his Long Telegram, had both a Spykmanesque and Mackinderesque feel. Containment is the peripheral sea power’s name for what the Heartland power calls encirclement.12 The defense of Western Europe, Israel, moderate Arab states, the Shah’s Iran, and the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam all carried the notion of preventing a communist empire from extending control from the Heartland to the Rimland. In his landmark work, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, published in 1957, the young Henry Kissinger writes that “limited war represents the only means for preventing the Soviet bloc, at an acceptable cost, from overrunning the peripheral areas of Eurasia,” especially since, as Kissinger continues, the Soviet Union as the Heartland power possesses “interior lines of communications” that allow it to assemble a considerable force “at any given point along its periphery.”13 Poland, Iran, Afghanistan, Vietnam—battlegrounds all in the history of the Cold War, and all were on the periphery of Soviet and Chinese communism. This was Mackinder’s world, but with the sensibility of Spykman.

  As Spykman looks out from the vantage point of 1942 beyond World War II, we see the anxious foresight of which the geographical discipline is capable. Even as the Allies are losing and the utter destruction of Hitler’s war machine is a priority, Spykman worries aloud about the implications of leaving Germany demilitarized. “A Russian state from the Urals to the North Sea,”
he explains, “can be no great improvement over a German state from the North Sea to the Urals.” Russian airfields on the English Channel would be as dangerous as German airfields to the security of Great Britain. Therefore, a powerful Germany will be necessary following Hitler. Likewise, even as the United States has another three years of vicious island fighting with the Japanese military ahead of it, Spykman is recommending a postwar alliance with Japan against the continental powers of Russia and particularly a rising China. Japan is a net importer of food, and inadequate in oil and coal production, but with a great naval tradition, making it both vulnerable and useful. A large, offshore island nation of East Asia, it could serve the same function for the United States in the Far East as Britain serves in Europe. Spykman underscores the necessity of a Japanese ally against a powerful China, even as in the early 1940s China is weak and reeling under Japanese military devastation:

  A modern, vitalized, and militarized China … is going to be a threat not only to Japan, but also to the position of the Western Powers in the Asiatic Mediterranean. China will be a continental power of huge dimensions in control of a large section of the littoral of that middle sea. Her geographic position will be similar to that of the United States in regard to the American Mediterranean. When China becomes strong, her present economic penetration in that region will undoubtedly take on political overtones. It is quite possible to envisage the day when this body of water will be controlled not by British, American, or Japanese sea power but by Chinese air power.14

  Perhaps Spykman’s most telling observation concerns Europe. Just as he is opposed to both German and Russian domination of Europe, he is also opposed to a united Europe under any circumstances. He prefers a balance of power among states within Europe as more advantageous to American interests than a European federation, even were it to come about peacefully and democratically. “A federal Europe,” he writes, “would constitute an agglomeration of force that would completely alter our significance as an Atlantic power and greatly weaken our position in the Western Hemisphere.” Because the European Union is still in an intermediate phase of development, with strong national leaders pursuing coordinated, yet ultimately independent, foreign policies, despite the creation of a single currency zone, it is too soon to pass judgment on Spykman’s prediction. Yet already one can see that the more united Europe becomes, the greater its tensions with the United States. A true European super-state with armed forces and a single foreign policy at its command would be both a staunch competitor of the U.S., and possibly the dominant outside power in the equidistant zone of southern South America.15 (Of course, Europe’s current financial crisis make this prospect doubtful.)

  Here is where Spykman differs markedly from Mackinder and Cold War containment policy.16 Containment policy, which encouraged a united Europe as a bulwark against Soviet communism, was rooted in the liberal ideals of a free society as well as in geopolitics. George Kennan, when he wrote the Long Telegram, put his faith in the Western way of life, which he believed would outlast the totalitarian strictures of Soviet communism. It followed, therefore, that like-minded democratic European states were to be encouraged in their efforts toward a common political and economic union. Spykman, though, is even more cold-blooded than Kennan—himself a hardcore realist. Spykman will simply not let any elements outside of geographical ones enter into his analysis. Unlike Haushofer, it is not that he doesn’t believe in democracy and a free society: rather, it is that he does not feel the existence of it has much of a role in geopolitical analysis. Spykman sees his job not as improving the world, but in saying what he thinks is going on in it. It is this very ice-in-his-veins sensibility that permits him to see beyond Kennan and the Cold War. Thus, in 1942 he can still write about today:

  Only statesmen who can do their political and strategic thinking in terms of a round earth and a three-dimensional warfare can save their countries from being outmaneuvered on distant flanks. With air power supplementing sea power and mobility again the essence of warfare, no region of the globe is too distant to be without strategic significance, too remote to be neglected in the calculations of power politics.17

  In other words, because of air power and the expeditionary ability of, in particular, the American military to deploy quickly anywhere, the entire earth is in play. But it isn’t only in play for us, but for everyone in Mackinder’s “closed system,” thanks to communications technology, of which air power is related. Nevertheless, the planet is too big a system to be dominated by one hegemon, so, as Spykman writes, there will a “regional decentralization of power,” with each big area affecting the other. He intuits a world of multiple hegemons: similar to the multipolarity that we now all talk about, and which exists already in an economic and political sense, but not quite yet in a military one, because of the great distance still separating the United States from other national militaries. But an emerging world of regional behemoths: the United States, the European Union, China, India, and Russia—with middle powers such as Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil—would bear out his observations.18

  What will be the dynamics of such a world? Spykman practices futurology in the best way possible, by staring at maps from different angles. His most arresting insights come from a northern polar map. “Two significant features clearly stand out: the concentration of the land masses in the Northern Hemisphere, and their starfishlike dispersion from the North Pole as a center toward Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, South America and Cape Horn, and Australia.” Looking at this projection, land is nearly everywhere; whereas if you stare at a southern polar projection, it is water that is nearly everywhere. The northern polar map shows how the northern continents are relatively close to one another, and the southern continents are far apart. Of course, in this projection the distance between the southern continents is exaggerated, yet the map is still symbolic of how far away Australia is from South America, and South America from Africa. Thus, the geographically close relationship between North America and Eurasia is dynamic and constitutes “the base lines of world politics,” while those between the southern continents are much less important. Again, he is not saying that South America and Africa are insignificant in and of themselves, only that their relationships with each other are. South America and Africa achieve significance in geopolitics only in their relationships with the northern continents. But the real message about this polar map is the organic relationship between North America and Eurasia. We think of the vast Pacific as separating the west coast of North America from East Asia. But the polar route indicates that it is just a matter of flying north to Alaska and then south, down across the Russian Far East, to the temperate zone of Japan, Korea, and China. The Arctic, especially if it warms, will give new meaning to sea power and especially air power in future decades. Supersonic transport may cut the distance between the west coast of the United States and cities in Asia by two-thirds. The increased use of polar routes will lock the United States, Russia, and China in an ever tighter embrace. Geography, because it will be more accessible, will, counterintuitively, become more crucial.19 Globalization, understood as the breaking down of walls, results in an increase in the number and intensity of contacts, which holds out the greater likelihood of both political conflict and cooperation.

  Mackinder argues that once the world becomes “a closed political system, the ultimate geographical reality would make itself felt.”20 By that he means the recognition of the World-Island as a single unit in geopolitics, with North America as the most significant of the continental satellites in the surrounding seas. It is the Northern Hemisphere that Mackinder is talking about here, as all of mainland Eurasia and much of Africa—the components of the World-Island—fall inside it. Spykman’s Rimland thesis fits neatly with this scenario, with the marginal zones of Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Far East together dominating the seaboard continuum around Eurasia in the Indian and Pacific oceans, buttressed by their substantial populations, economic development, and h
ydrocarbon resources: together, they check the Heartland power of Russia, even as Russia gains the warming waters of its northern Arctic seaboard.21 Just as the Arctic will be a hub of planes and ships connecting North America with the northern reaches of the World-Island, the Greater Indian Ocean will form the maritime interstate of the World-Island’s commercial and military traffic, connecting Africa and the Middle East with East Asia.

  Still, the Eurasian Rimland will not be united in any strictly political sense. In a world of multiple regional hegemons, the danger with which both Mackinder and Spykman were concerned, that of a single land power dominating Eurasia, or a single sea power dominating the Eurasian Rimland, appears nowhere on the horizon. Not even the Chinese, with their rising sea power, appear capable of this achievement, checked as they will be by the American, Indian, Japanese, Australian, and other navies. Nevertheless, as we shall see, a world of subtle power arrangements, where trade and economics will erode sheer military might, will still be one of geopolitics governed by geography, especially in the world’s oceans, which will be more crowded than ever. To see this maritime world better, we will next turn to another thinker from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Chapter VII

  THE ALLURE OF SEA POWER

  Whereas Mackinder’s emphasis was on land power because of emerging technological developments in rail and road transport, the same Industrial Revolution made American Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a slightly older contemporary of Mackinder, a proponent of sea power. Mahan thought sea power not only more important than land power in the fight for dominance, but also less threatening to international stability. Mahan noted that it is “the limited capacity of navies to extend coercive force inland” that makes them no menace to liberty. Mahan thought that instead of the Heartland of Eurasia being the geographical pivot of empires, it was conversely the Indian and Pacific oceans that constituted the hinges of geopolitical destiny. For these oceans would allow for a maritime nation to project power around the Eurasian Rimland, affecting political developments inland—thanks to the same rail and road feeder networks—deep into Central Asia. Nicholas Spykman, with his own emphasis on the Rimland around the Indian and Pacific oceans, was as profoundly influenced by Mahan as he was by Mackinder.