The Revenge of Geography

Robert D. Kaplan “The Revenge of Geography: What the map tells us about coming conflicts and the battle against fate”  Random House, 2012, 346 pp.

I found this book a very hard read—at least for me, but I did retrieve some useful nuggets from my struggle.  The book’s thesis is that we need to recover a sensibility about time and space that has been lost in the jet and information ages.  Geography’s importance is being overlooked. 

Probably the most important nugget in this book is: 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.

I also liked:  Remembering WWI’s atrocious loss of life, caused Munich; Remembering Munich caused Vietnam; Remembering Vietnam caused Rwanda; Remembering Rwanda caused Serbia, Remembering the easy success in Serbia caused Iraq and Afghanistan.

My Notes:

Pg. 21: The Post-Cold War has brought us to the recognition that the very totalitarianism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge.  There are things worse than communism, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. (Note: the author had favored our invasion of Iraq but has since changed his mind).

Pg. 32:  It is no accident that the world’s poorest regions tend to be where geography, by way of soil suitability, supports high population densities, but not economic growth—because of distance from ports and railheads.  Central India and inland Africa are prime examples of this.

Pg. 44:  Europe’s climate is harsh, cold, and wet.  The greater the ease of the environment, the weaker the stimulus toward civilization.  Thus Europe developed because of a geography that was difficult in which to live but had many natural nodal points of transport and commerce.  For civilizations are in many ways brave and fortitudinous reactions to natural environments. 

Pg. 120:  The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first century geography.  There are already twenty-five cities in the world with a population of over 10 million people, and that number will rise to forty by 2015, with all but two in the former Third World.  Greater Tokyo leads with 35 million.  The key fact is that there are many cities in the former Third World which just miss making the list, and that over half of humanity now lives in urban conditions, a statistic that will rise to two-thirds by 2025.  There are 468 cities in the world with populations exceeding one million.  We are in an era with a significant percentage of people living in slumlike conditions.

Pg. 142:  Rome’s breakup lead over the centuries to the formation of peoples and nation-states with which we are now familiar, and which was formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia following the Thirty Years’ War in 1648.  Antiquity was, above all, defined by the geographic hold of the Mediterranean, and as that hold slackened, with Rome losing its hinterlands in northern Europe and the Near East, the world of the Middle Ages was born.  (This reminds me of my first day of college when we were assigned to write a paper on why the term Medieval had a derogatory connotation.  Can you guess how many of those words I had to look up in the dictionary?)

Pg. 212:  China has signed military agreements with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.  The stabilization of China’s land borders may be one of the most important geopolitical changes in Asia of the past few decades.  There is no longer a Soviet army bearing down on Manchuria like during the Cold War, a time when China concentrated its defense budget on its army, and pointedly neglected the seas.  The significance of this cannot be overstated.  Since antiquity China has been preoccupied with land invasions of one sort or another.  The current favorable situation on land has allowed China to start building a great navy and reestablish the Pacific and maybe even Indian oceans as part of its geography.

Pg. 228:  As the U.S. and China become great power rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the twenty-first century.  India looms as the ultimate pivot state.

Pg. 303:  The 2011 Arab uprisings that swept away several regimes were about the power of communications technology and the defeat of geography.  But as time passes, the geographies of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and other countries will reassert themselves.

Pg. 326:  Even if we 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. 

Pg. 337:  The current immigrant flow into the U.S. is 50 percent Hispanic.  This much less diverse immigrant flow than in the past makes assimilation less likely, especially because of the concentration of Hispanic population in the southwest.

Pg. 341:  While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to Mexico whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Pg. 346:  We must be a balancing power in Eurasia and a unifying power in North America—doing both will be easier than doing just one.