The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  The pattern continues, in other words: In the vast area between a cratering Levant and an internally troubled China, no state is improving its capacity to govern effectively. They are all either weakening or headed nowhere good.

  Pakistan’s chronic instability could well limit China’s ability to complete its Silk Road project from the Indian Ocean northward into western China, with a band of separatist violence from Baluchistan in the south to Xinjiang in the north perpetually simmering along the whole route. In this way, China, as a secure domestic entity, might only exist within, say, its greater arable cradle, from which tentacles of lucrative trade protrude outward. Thus, the true map of China and its shadow zones, again, would resemble the medieval one that Marco Polo knew. In terms of the dry-land portion of the earth, no region will do more by itself to tell us who wields more power and how stable things really are in the early twenty-first century than Greater Central Asia, encompassing the Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

  Consider Afghanistan for a moment. The U.S. military can arguably save face in Afghanistan, but it cannot stabilize it. If anyone holds the key to economically and perhaps even politically stabilizing Afghanistan, it is mainly China through resource extraction, and also the Caspian Sea countries through the building of a natural gas transport network south through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, India and Iran work together to counter the influence of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in Afghanistan. If the Indians and the Iranians can build the Char Bahar port and transport project, linking that Iranian port on the Indian Ocean with Central Asia, with a spur line into Afghanistan, it can then compete with the China–Pakistan Silk Road project extending northward from Gwadar. As for the Russians, who have an interest in fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan because of Afghanistan’s contiguity with the former Soviet Union, they continue to develop their intelligence contacts with both Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan provides a signal lesson about the limits of American power, coupled with the continued relevance of geography, which Washington elites fail to respect at their peril.

  Afghanistan, which has been at war in one form or another for almost four decades, and Pakistan, which has never really been safe from tribal insurgencies and political turmoil for almost seven decades, demonstrate that the configuration of the Indian subcontinent into two larger states and several smaller ones may not be the last word in human political organization there. To wit, the political map may evolve over time: Pakistan can partially crumble into a rump Greater Punjab with Baluchistan and Sind gaining more de facto independence, with vast implications for India. And it is the Indian subcontinent that I am talking about: Since parts of Afghanistan were incorporated into various Indian imperial dynasties, governments in New Delhi always have considered Afghanistan in conceptual terms as part of a Greater India, stretching from the Iranian Plateau in the west to the Burmese jungles in the east. Whereas China seeks to expand vertically south to the Indian Ocean, India seeks to expand horizontally along or close to the Indian Ocean, with a special growing influence in the Persian Gulf.*34 Therein lies the contest between these two faded empires.

  The Flattening Himalayas and the Nationalist Undercurrent

  Indeed, the defeat of distance effected by military technology has created a new strategic geography of rivalry between India and China. Indian ballistic missiles can reach cities in China’s arable cradle while Chinese fighter jets can reach the Indian subcontinent. Indian warships are in the South China Sea while Chinese warships sail throughout the Indian Ocean, with China deeply involved in port development projects in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea that virtually surround India on three sides. The high wall of the Himalayas no longer separates these two great civilizations, and hasn’t for some time. Trade routes linking China and India, by way of Tibet, Nepal, West Bengal, and Myanmar—joining Lhasa, Kathmandu, and Kolkata—will only further mature, with peaceful commerce cushioning the impact of this new strategic geography.*35 But these widened tentacles of vehicular transport also might be used for Chinese tanks to enter India. Again, connectivity does not necessarily presage a more peaceful world. Eurasia is cohering into both a single trade and conflict system.

  Oxford historian and archaeologist Barry Cunliffe writes that the maritime network of the Portuguese in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—whose ports and trading posts punctuated the entire Indian Ocean seaboard—helped bring the vast Eurasian landmass into a new global system.*36 The Chinese, with their investments in Indian Ocean ports (in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Djibouti, and Tanzania), are doing for the postmodern era what the Portuguese did for the late medieval and early modern ones, even while the map lines connecting these new and expanded ports approximate Marco Polo’s return route. The “nexus” of China, the Middle East, and Africa now accounts for more than half of world trade, writes Parag Khanna.*37

  This is truly a Chinese maritime empire we are talking about. Like that of the Portuguese, it is mainly limited to the coast, and does not guarantee China pivotal influence inland. Myanmar’s political liberalization offers the example of a country reaching out to India and the United States to avoid domination by China: Geography still rules, but globalization and the communications revolution amplify the opportunities for out-of-area powers. Furthermore, while the ships of the Portuguese and the Spanish may have invented the global system, that system’s very complexity now has reached a point where it embraces a multidimensional and interlocking tendency for violent conflict.

  And keep another thing in mind: Both China and Russia have influence of increasing imperial dimensions, even as they weaken internally from economic stresses of a profound and structural kind. The very fragility of these highly centralized, Politburo-style regimes inside their own countries makes them increasingly aggressive beyond their borders, since nationalism can serve as a unifying element in times of societal stress. China and Russia are the hinge states on which the organization of this entire Eurasian conflict system depends, and given the constricted and copious interactions from one end of the supercontinent to the other, future palace coups and intrigues in Beijing and Moscow can trigger fires throughout the Eastern Hemisphere.

  The surface of this world will be cosmopolitan, but with nationalism—as China and Russia demonstrate—still composing the bedrock. To be sure, city-states such as Qatar, Dubai, and Singapore illustrate that cosmopolitan surface. One can’t help but think of the eclectic cities of the Levant at the turn of the twentieth century: Alexandria, Smyrna, and Beirut, where, writes historian Philip Mansel, “people switched identities as easily as they switched languages.”*38 And regarding Odessa of the same period, there was “nothing national” about this cosmopolitan city.*39 Salonica, too, fell within this exciting category; but here, more darkly, as ethnic nationalism began to take hold, “Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks,” explains Columbia professor Mark Mazower.*40 For the easygoing Ottoman imperial tolerance, which allowed for such a high degree of cosmopolitanism in the first place, was giving way to the hardened national and ethnic divides that have been a feature of the industrial and postindustrial ages. Imperialism and cosmopolitanism go together, in other words, since empires are by definition multi-ethnic and multi-religious, whatever their bad reputation. But the end of formal imperialism and the continued internal weakening of faded empires that we see now are not friendly to postmodern forms of those multicultural Levantine cities. The city-states of the Persian Gulf and Singapore, with their international workforces, may somewhat resemble old Alexandria and Smyrna—but certainly not Aleppo, Mosul, or Karachi, where the collapse of European imperial rule spawned authoritarian and sectarian states that either have disintegrated or (in the case of Pakistan) are extremely dysfunctional. In such places, communal violence is the norm, and there is no sense of a patria.

  Because the Gulf states and Singapore depend upon a vibrant world trading order, which in turn depends o
n a stable balance of power, they provide little fundamental security of their own and, therefore, in geopolitical terms constitute an illusion. Violent Shi’ite separatism in eastern Saudi Arabia, a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and warfare in the South China Sea could wreck these city-state economies. The continued accumulation of corporate wealth, which these city-states represent, is more fragile and contingent than we think.

  Consider the port of al-Duqm, which I visited recently, built midway along a largely bleak and uninhabited Omani coastline. A multibillion-dollar rail and shipping complex taking advantage of Indian Ocean traffic between Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, al-Duqm did not even exist a few years ago. It is a testament to the continued power of location—of geography. Because al-Duqm lies just outside the Persian Gulf, but is proximate to it, conflict within the Gulf actually increases the importance of al-Duqm, whose rail and pipeline terminuses (in the future originating as far north as Kuwait) will fill waiting ships that dock in safety outside the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, al-Duqm was built in the expectation that the U.S. Fifth Fleet soon will want a more secure harbor than those available inside the Gulf. Al-Duqm, which shrinks the Eurasian trading system down to one port complex, is a monument to pessimism: It assumes future conflict and the instability that comes with connectivity.

  The Contracting Rimland and the Meaning of Bulgaria

  This increasingly crowded and interconnected world will have so many layers of horizontal linkages between one part of Afro-Eurasia and another that it will be increasingly difficult for the United States to exert pressure on it. China, Russia, and Iran will be part of the same supply chain of trade and transportation that works to thwart U.S. influence. In the past, Eurasia was simply too vast to work to the advantage of any one power. The Mongol Empire from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane (and including Kublai Khan) was the singular, stunning exception to this. But as technology has collapsed distance, advancing the possibilities of trade and supply chains, there is now the possibility of some semblance of Eurasian unity among China, Russia, and Iran, with China as the first among equals, just as in Marco Polo’s day. But whereas in the High Middle Ages the Yuan Empire posed no challenge to Europe, in a more shrunken, tightly wound world of high technology, the challenge to the United States of such a Eurasian trading network is obvious.

  Of course, opportunities will arise for the United States, ironically due to this very connectivity—as when Myanmar uses the United States to balance against China. And as the principal geographical satellite of the Afro-Eurasian landmass,*41 North America will remain pivotal to world history even while it is protected from many of the disruptions that will overtake Afro-Eurasia itself. For this is a world that will be more volatile precisely because of the growth of middle and working classes that are less stoical than the rural poor, of which there will be less. Indeed, it is the shantytown, the incubator of misery and utopian ideology, that will help define the megacities of Afro-Eurasia. The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.

  Nevertheless, the United States has a problem. For a century it has sought to prevent any one power from gaining the same degree of dominance in the Eastern Hemisphere that it itself possesses in the Western Hemisphere. And that is still certainly possible. While one power per se may not gain such dominance, however, a grouping of powers might, with a de-Westernized Europe, Russia, Turkey, and Iran leveraging the power of China through trade and Silk Road connectivity. Eurasia is getting smaller, and that may make it harder for the United States to play one power on the supercontinent off against the other. Think of a world with more conflict and disruption, amplified by technology and the growth of megacities, while at the same time evincing a degree of economic unity, encouraged by new infrastructure on land and maritime platforms at sea in the Greater Indian Ocean, that will thwart American influence in the Old World. The United States will remain the most potent individual power, but that will mean less and less as powers on the same supercontinent find themselves more closely linked by trade.

  Yet, given the political weakening and stagnation I have described throughout the Greater Middle East and Central Asia, this is a very contradictory picture I have laid out. And that is the point. For the world is going in different directions, and the sheer scale of activity will make dominance from any one geographical point like ours harder.

  Perhaps no place provides an insight into the challenge faced by the United States more than Bulgaria, just one of the many countries that are invisible to the Washington policy elite and consequently are never part of its conversation. Bulgaria is a member of NATO and the European Union, but it is located at the far southeastern end of Europe—historically part of the Near East, or “Turkey in Europe,” as much of the Balkans were labeled in the late nineteenth century. Bulgaria was the most loyal Warsaw Pact satellite of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, following America’s victory in the Cold War, and a time when NATO and the EU appeared invincible, Bulgaria saw its future wholly inside the West. American and Western power back then was such that, even as few in Washington focused on the country, it was safe within our embrace. Bulgaria’s border with Turkey, its proximity to Russia, and its closely related Slavic language did not seem to matter as much as they used to. American power, it appeared, had defeated geography. Fast-forward to today: Bulgaria is still in NATO and the EU, but the Russians and the Turks are aggressively competing for the destiny of the country, with Turkey being among Bulgaria’s biggest trading partners and the Russians, especially, involved in various forms of subversion, from organized crime to encouraging nationalist parties. Bulgaria, because of its weak institutions, and the increasing inability of Brussels to project power into its own far-flung hinterlands, is a compromised country whose political integrity nobody trusts. The unipolarity that defined the Post Cold War is over, the West itself is dissipating, and we are back to classical geography—particularly in Europe.

  Indeed, what was supposed to have been a monochrome superstate from Iberia to the Black Sea, integral to the very conception of the West, is now decaying into various color tones on a neo-medieval map, with various layers of political and even civilizational identity: There is still the EU, but also individual states, regions, and city-states, with liberalism barely holding off the forces of populist nationalism. To say that this does not undermine the strength of NATO is to be in denial, especially as regional military groupings (Baltic-Scandinavia, Visegrad) strengthen within Europe. NATO will continue to exist in full, but, even more so in the future than in the past, emergencies will require the United States to force the alliance into action. Without powerful arm-twisting by the United States, even an Article 5 violation by Russia may not rouse NATO on its own, beyond the holding of meetings and more meetings.

  Yet, as the example of Bulgaria indicates, Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.) Again, Eurasia and the Near East increasingly begin inside Europe.

  A stark realization emerges: America can defend its interests modestly defined, but it cannot change the world into a version of itself. In a word, we cannot ultimately defend Bulgaria—let alone Iraq or Afghanistan—from within.

  The Geopolitics of a Naval Power

  Our response to this entire dilemma begins with defining accurately who we are. In geopolitical terms, the United States is a maritime power, operating from the greatest of the island satellites of the Eurasian supercontinent, whose mission is to defend a free trading order from which we ou
rselves benefit. In the tradition of the British imperial navy, we protect the global commons. Free trade works in tandem with liberal democracies but does not necessarily require them. Countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Taiwan, and Singapore have over the span of the decades fallen under the category of enlightened dictatorships that nevertheless have been conducive to liberal values worldwide. Our allies are mainly democracies but not always so, as these examples suggest. The world is intractable enough (and becoming more so) without our needing to impose our values on other countries’ internal systems. Thus, we should start with asking how we can act with caution and restraint, without drifting into neo-isolationism. Air and naval power are actually suited to a restrained foreign policy, since it is about projecting power over broad reaches of the earth without getting bogged down with land forces in any one place, and without incurring significant casualties. We must keep our limitations in mind, especially as the two signal advantages of U.S. power projection since the end of World War II have been steadily eroding: the advantage of being the only major country whose infrastructure was not either decimated or severely damaged between 1941 and 1945, and the advantage of having had a big internal market that for a long time protected its workers from the rigors of global competition. Our middle class was built on this internal market, and thus was willing and able for decades to support vast military expenditures.