The New Old-Time Geography of Conflict

Robert D. Kaplan has a fascinating article in the new issue of Foreign Policy in which he makes the case for the preeminence of geography in determining the patterns of conquest and conflict throughout the world. He sees this view as a revival of a classical approach to world affairs which had taken a backseat in recent decades. The 20th Century had inaugurated a period of narratives of world affairs driven by broad ideologies - Communism! Fascism! Democracy! - rather than the literal global landscape; but Kaplan argues for returning geography to its erstwhile pride of place in describing world affairs:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.

So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

Kaplan describes a number of thinkers who had perceived the significance of geography in shaping global affairs. One was the French historian Fernand Braudel, who wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1949, which portrayed the ancient expansions of the Greek and Roman empires as a consequence of the marginal soils of the Mediterranean region. Another was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US Naval Captain who "saw the Indian and Pacific oceans as the hinges of geopolitical destiny, for they would allow a maritime nation to project power all around the Eurasian rim and thereby affect political developments deep into Central Asia." Yet another was the prescient Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman, who foresaw the necessity of America's protection of Japan and the rise of China before he died in 1943.

But Kaplan focuses particularly on Sir Halford J. Mackinder who, writing 1904, saw the global order as the inevitable product of the relations established across the vast expanses of Eurasia:

His thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the “pivot” around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the “heartland” in a later book. Surrounding it are four “marginal” regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two “monsoon lands”: one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa” and for the most part “thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is).

Europe's history, in the context of this landscape, is the story of an appendage to the great Eurasian landmass, despite the anomalous "Columbian epoch" of European discovery and colonialism. And the history of Russia, in particular, can be read as the history of a nation thoroughly traumatized by its invasion by Mongol hordes, and a consequent obsession with territorial acquisitiveness. This would later lead, during the Cold War, to a recapitulation of the struggle for control over the marginal areas of Eurasia, with a US containment policy of Communism that "depended heavily on rimland bases across the greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean."

Kaplan sees the geostrategically most important regions of the world as spreading through the same arc of lands - from the Middle East through South Asia and East Asia - that Mackinder described as the marginal regions of Eurasia. But unlike in previous centuries, these areas are deeply integrated with each other - rubbing shoulders, thanks to technological change, rather than being separate by natural geographical buffers as they had been in the past. (For example, countries from Israel through Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea form a contiguous overlapping region in which one country's ballistic missile range infringes on that of its neighbors.) Within this zone of potential geopolitical turbulence, Kaplan describes four "shatter zones" that may be particularly prone to instability and conflict in the decades ahead.

One shatter zone is the Indian subcontinent, where Nepal and Bangladesh constitute alarmingly weak states and are home to tens of millions of people; but they are paragons of stability compared to Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan’s raison d’être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

The Pashtuns occupy a swathe of land that sprawls across portions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If Pakistan falls apart, "Pashtunistan" would likely arise to partially take its place, which in turn would lead to the total dissolution of Afghanistan.

A second shatter zone is the Arabian peninsula. Interestingly, Kaplan describes the threat in this region not as arising within the Saudi Kingdom itself, but across the porous Saudi border with Yemen. Kaplan describes Yemen, a chaotic country in the southwestern corner of the peninsula that has almost as many people as Saudi Arabia itself, as "crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible...Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two." Yemen, by the way, has one of the highest birth rates in the world.

A third shatter zone is in the area of the Fertile Crescent. In this case, it is due to the fact that the state borders of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are almost totally divorced from the realities of natural geography that the potential for conflict exists. This is particularly true in the case of Iraq. Since there is nothing "natural" about the borders of Iraq - either in terms of natural borders or the distribution of ethnic and religious groups - a succession of strongmen has arisen in the country to hold the disparate pieces of the national fabric together. Saddam Hussein was the most recent, though not necessarily the last, of these. Some American intelligence experts tried to envision a more "rational" ordering of states in the Middle East - one that would reflect the realities of physical and cultural geography in the region:



(Though just a thought experiment, this map, which was posted at Strange Maps, caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Middle East, where some people, understandably suspicious of American intentions in the region, saw it as arrogant and colonialist; of course, it was colonialism that led to the capricious carving of borders in the Middle East in the first place.)

The Persian Core, stretching from the Persian Gulf through the interior of Iran to the Caspian Sea, constitutes a final shatter zone. This region contains a huge amount of oil and natural gas wealth, both in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, and Iran has a hand in each of those regions. And Iran controls most of the Persian Gulf, including its entrance to the Indian Ocean at the Strait of Hormuz. According to Kaplan, its not accidental that Persia has played a prominent role throughout history. Unlike the other nations of the Middle East, its territorial borders follow the patterns of its natural geography.

Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.

The threat in Iran is not, as in the other shatter zones, in its potential for dissolution; rather, its that a geographically unified and strong Persian state might erupt out of its own borders to create instability in the surrounding regions.

Kaplan concludes by noting that "we all must learn to think like Victorians." That is, we have to be open to the insights of geographical determinism: the view that geography and climate, more than ideology, will drive the important events and conflicts of the next century. Kaplan uses another word to describe this attitude - a word that had lost some of its currency in the years after September 11th, but which now is enjoying something of a revival: realism.

UPDATE: For an interesting and skeptical take on Kaplan's article, go here.