The Revenge of Geography

by Robert Kaplan

The idea that human affairs can be largely understood by looking at the relief map is not particularly in vogue at present, when the power of ideas is considered supreme. Yet geography continues to play a surprisingly resilient role in politics. This book is one of Kaplan's typical sweeping historical analyses, looking at how the contours of the world map continue to give us clues to how states will act. Love him or hate him, as always he is exceptionally erudite. One of the interesting arguments he makes, drawing from the geographer Harold Mackinder, is how the existence of liberalism is often dependent on the existence of large bodies of water surrounding a nation. The existence of maritime boundaries tends to make nations feel secure about themselves, while bustling ports generate a certain natural cosmopolitanism. Such a map is of course not a sufficient cause for liberalism. But it may be a required one. England thus became, or at least was not prevented from becoming, an exceptionally liberal nation, while the United States as a gigantic island is an even more liberal one today. Land-based nations on the other hand tend to require authoritarian government by default in order to maintain basic order and police their dangerous, porous frontiers. The conflict between a liberal United States and authoritarian Soviet Union during the Cold War could perhaps be understood in part through reference to their respective geographic layouts. Even today, the United States southern land border is an issue of primary importance in the narratives of its authoritarian-leaning political figures. In a sense, this is natural. Perhaps we have committed a great crime in trying to force liberalism on land-based and even land-locked nations abroad.

The political consequences of loneliness, urbanization, and globalization will be definitive in the coming century. They have already made themselves felt in various progressive and reactionary movements around the world and that there will be more surprises ahead is a certainty. Interestingly, Kaplan sees a world in which imperial metropoles and their former colonies increasingly collapse into one another. In Europe this will mean an increasingly African and Middle Eastern social reality, while in the United States its former imperial stomping grounds of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean will come to define its future. How the United States handles this epochal change, and how stable and successful a state that Mexico itself manages to be, will be far more important to ordinary Americans than the outcome of any distant Middle Eastern conflict or even the war today raging between Ukraine and Russia. Even in a world where cultural distance has been eradicated by technology, the relief map decides.