The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  With a Eurasian littoral increasingly crowded with warships in order to accommodate the ambitions of the Chinese, Indians, and others alongside the U.S., even as an ever more practical polar route cuts distances between Eurasia and North America, worldwide hegemonic struggles may only quicken in speed and intensity. Thus, we now need to explore the features of a closed geographic system.

  Chapter VIII

  THE “CRISIS OF ROOM”

  As a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis some years back, I taught a course about future challenges in national security. I started the semester by having the midshipmen read Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age by Yale political science professor Paul Bracken. A brief and clairvoyant tour de force that sold poorly when it was published in 1999, Bracken’s book is very much in the spirit of Mackinder and Spykman, even as there are no references to them in his text. Bracken, who has served as a consultant to nearly all Post Cold War American government reassessments, draws a conceptual map of Eurasia defined by the ongoing collapse of time and distance, and the filling up of empty spaces—something that William McNeill first alerted us to in the latter chapters of his grand history of humanity. But because Bracken writes during a more dramatic stage of this development, this leads him to declare a “crisis of room.” Bracken refers to the idea of the great Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann, who contended that in the past a sparsely populated geography had acted as a safety mechanism against military and technological advances. Yet von Neumann worried that geography was now losing the battle. Undeniably, the very “finite size of the earth” would increasingly be a force for instability, as military hardware and software condensed distances on the geopolitical map. “This is an easy change to miss,” Bracken warns, “because it is gradual.”1

  Let me condense Bracken’s thesis into a few pages. For it matters greatly to the development of my own.

  While the Americans and Europeans focus on globalization, the appeal of nationalism and military power is growing in Eurasia. Missile and bomb tests, biological warfare programs, and the development of chemical weapons are “the products of a prosperous, liberalizing Asia,” Bracken notes. What the West has “failed to recognize” is that the technologies of war and wealth creation have always been closely connected: from Asia’s economic rise has come its military rise. In the early Cold War years, Asian military forces were primarily lumbering, World War II–type armies whose primary purpose, though never stated, was national consolidation. “The army was an instrument of mass indoctrination, a giant school with a core curriculum of nationhood.” Soldiers helped bring in the crops more often than they honed their battlefield skills. Thus, armies were focused inward, even as many a state army was separated by enormous tracts of mileage from other state armies. But as national wealth accumulated and the computer revolution took hold, Asian militaries from the oil-rich Middle East to the tiger economies of the Pacific developed full-fledged, military-civilian postindustrial complexes, with missiles and fiber optics and cellular phones. At the same time, Eurasian states were becoming bureaucratically more cohesive, allowing their militaries and their leaders to focus outward and away from domestic politics, toward other states—becoming more lethal and professional in the process. Rather than retreat into the countryside in the face of danger, an option in epochs past, now electronic sensors monitor international borders with weapons of mass destruction at the ready. Geography, rather than a cushion, has become a prison from which there is no escape.2

  “An unbroken belt of countries from Israel to North Korea” (including Syria, Iran, Pakistan, India, and China) “has assembled either nuclear or chemical arsenals and is developing ballistic missiles. A multipolar balance of terror stretches over a 6,000-mile arc,” cutting across military and political theaters and “regional studies” departments into which the West divides up Asia. The “death of distance” is upon us, Bracken warns. Take Japan, which ever since North Korea in 1998 fired a missile across it, landing in the Pacific Ocean, is no longer a zone of sanctuary, but an integral part of mainland Asia military space, despite its archipelagic geography. Over the centuries, the concept of Asia was created by Western maritime power, beginning with the Portuguese at the turn of the sixteenth century. It was then deconstructed into separate regions by the Cold War. But in the 1970s, as an economic boom swept East Asia, a large and new region, the “Pacific Basin,” was formed, the basis for a return to a holistic map of Asia. This economic success story was possible only because the threat of force was unthinkable: that, in turn, was because there was a military hegemon, the United States, which guaranteed the peace. Now, as Asia returns to being a single organic unit, U.S. power is slowly receding and the military power of China, India, and other indigenous states is rising. Asia is enlarging as regional subunits collapse. It is getting more claustrophobic because of the expansion of both populations and missile ranges; and it is becoming more volatile, because of the accumulation of weaponry without concomitant alliance structures.3

  As Bracken explains, because of its immense size, for most of history alliances never mattered much in Asia, as armies were too far removed from one another to come to one another’s aid. This was unlike the situation in Europe where many powerful states were bunched up against one another in a narrow peninsula. But that is now changing. Across Eurasia missiles and weapons of mass destruction are being built, not infantry forces. The naval and marine patrols of various states, pulsing with technology, are ranging far from home ports in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. China, Japan, India, Israel, and other nations are developing communications grids using satellites and underwater listening devices. India, which for most of history found China largely irrelevant to its security concerns, because the two countries were separated by the highest mountains in the world, now has its own satellites and reconnaissance aircraft providing details of Chinese troop movements in Tibet. Meanwhile, the Indian navy has set up a Far Eastern Command in the Andaman Islands, 750 miles east of India proper, to counter a Chinese naval presence that is also far from its home shores. As “Asian industrial power becomes aligned with Asian military power,” Bracken writes, the continent is literally running out of room for mistakes and miscalculations, becoming, in effect, “the shrinking Eurasian chessboard.”4

  To this shrinking chessboard, Bracken adds the destabilizing factor of “disruptive technologies”: technologies that, rather than help sustain leadership and the current global power structure, “undermine it by disrupting the status quo.” Such technologies include computer viruses and weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear and biological bombs. Bracken writes:

  Disruptive technology changes the game. By upsetting existing advantages, it nurtures new skills and fosters different strategies. The resulting uncertainty shakes up the established order and changes the standards by which leadership is measured.5

  Indeed, disruptive technology, abetted by religious zealotry, brought the Iranian plateau to the doorstep of geographical Palestine, even though Iran and Israel are separated by over eight hundred miles. And Iran is merely part of a trend. As I’ve indicated, rather than shop only for the latest in Western armaments, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and other countries are developing disruptive technologies. In an age of former Third World countries acquiring tactical nuclear weapons, large forward bases like the kind the U.S. military maintained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait prior to the two Gulf wars may henceforth be vulnerable to enemy attack. Such a development promises to hinder America’s projection of power around the Eurasian rimland, and thus pave the way toward a more unstable, multipolar power arrangement. It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might. But nuclear and chemical-biological weapons can destroy these forward sites, or at least render them unusable for a time. “Preservation of the asymmetric situation,” Bracken writes, “whereby the greatest military p
ower in Asia is not Asian [but American] depends on arms control”—something which is becoming increasingly problematic as former Third World nations develop disruptive military capabilities. For decades the United States and the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons without actually detonating them for “political maneuvers, implicit threats, deterrence, signaling, drawing lines in the sand, and other forms of psychological advantage.” Now more countries will want to do likewise, even as some will be motivated by a rage that is the upshot of poverty, even as they will lack the bureaucratic control mechanisms to responsibly control the use of these weapons. During the Cold War, both superpowers approached nuclear warfare with “detachment and rationality.” That may not be the case in what Bracken calls “the second nuclear age,” in which Eurasia constitutes a small room crowded with poor countries, some of which are nuclear powers.6

  “The spread of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in Asia is like the spread of the six-shooter in the American Old West,” says Bracken. Cheap and deadly, the six-shooter was an equalizer because it rendered the size and physical strength of a man much less important. Just as the six-shooter changed the balance of power among men in the Old West, so do poor man’s nukes and other disruptive technologies change the global balance of power.7

  The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia “makes the world less Eurocentric,” and thus greatly accelerates the process of globalization.8 The geography of Eurasia will become as intimate as the geography of Europe, where a myriad of powerful states, uncomfortably confined within a small space, constantly fought wars, with peace breaking out just as constantly through the practice of balance of power politics. There will not be the accumulation of masses of thermonuclear warheads that we saw during the Cold War, so that the peace and stability obtained by mutually assured destruction will not necessarily result, even as the damage one state will be able to do to another will be immense and—in a world of crowded megacities—nearly beyond comprehension. Thus, a closed geography will demand the ablest practitioners of Metternichian balance of power statecraft in order to prevent mass violence.

  To be sure, we may be entering a world of multidimensional brinkmanship. The shrinking of the map not only obliterates artificial regions invented by Cold War area studies, but also renders less distinct Mackinder’s and Spykman’s conception of a specific pivot and adjacent rimlands, since Eurasia has been reconfigured by technology into an organic whole. For example, military assistance from China and North Korea to Iran can cause Israel at the other end of the Eurasian landmass to take specific military actions. Because of vivid television images, bombs falling on Gaza can now incite crowds in Indonesia. The U.S. Air Force can attack landlocked Afghanistan from the island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean. While local militaries used to be confined to their regions, increasingly the Chinese and Indian navies will be projecting power from the Gulf of Aden all the way to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan—along the whole navigable rimland, that is. There are many more such examples of political situations in one part of Eurasia echoing and reechoing back from other parts. This does not negate geography, it just means that we have to add other factors to it. It no longer reigns supreme to the extent that it used to.

  The worries of Mackinder and Spykman will not only be intensified by the disruptive technologies that Bracken concentrates on, but by the sheer rise of urban populations themselves, which will make the map of Eurasia only more claustrophobic. In the 1990s, during the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War, when the terms “realist” and “determinist” were vilified in the heady days following the overthrow of communism, the ideas of the late-eighteenth century English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus were mocked by many intellectuals as too grim and fatalistic: for Malthus treats humankind as a species reacting to its physical environment, rather than as a body of self-willed individuals motivated by ideas. Malthus’s specific theory—that population increases geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically—was wrong. Yet as the years pass, with great fluctuations in world food and energy prices, and teeming multitudes of angry, lumpen faithful—young males predominantly—walled off in places like Karachi and Gaza (the Soweto of the Middle East), Malthus, the first philosopher to focus on demography and the political effects of the quality of life among the poor, has been getting more respect. Half the population of the West Bank and Gaza is under fifteen. Indeed, while the population of the Greater Middle East grows from 854 million to over 1.2 billion over the next twenty years, with the Arab world in the midst of nearly doubling its population even as supplies of groundwater greatly diminish, especially in places like Yemen, leading to explosive side effects on politics, the word “Malthusian” will be heard more often.

  Though proving Malthus right may be a useless exercise, his general worldview fits well with Bracken’s conception of a loss of room in Eurasia. Crowded megacities, beset by poor living conditions, periodic rises in the price of commodities, water shortages, and unresponsive municipal services, will be fertile petri dishes for the spread of both democracy and radicalism, even as regimes will be increasingly empowered by missiles and modern, outwardly focused militaries.

  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; Lagos is at the bottom with nearly 12 million. Thirteen of the twenty-five are in South or East Asia. Karachi, Tehran, Istanbul, and Cairo are the megacities in the Greater Middle East. 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. Almost all urban growth in the future will be in developing countries, specifically in Asia and Africa. We are in an era with a significant percentage of people living in slumlike conditions. During Mackinder’s time at the turn of the twentieth century, only 14 percent of humanity were urbanites.

  As I’ve noted, Ibn Khaldun writes in his Muqaddimah, or “Introduction” to a world history, that desert nomads, in aspiring to the physical comforts of sedentary life, create the original dynamic for urbanization that is then captured by powerful rulers and dynasties, which in turn, by providing security, allow cities to flourish. But because authority requires luxury, decay eventually sets in, as group solidarity erodes and individuals, through their accumulation of wealth and influence, weaken executive power. Thus, systems grow brittle and fragment, and are superseded by other formations.9 For the first time in history this process is operating on a global scale. Vast cities and megacities have formed as rural dwellers throughout Eurasia, Africa, and South America migrate toward urban centers from the underdeveloped countryside. As a consequence, the mayors and governors of these conurbations can less and less govern them effectively from a central dispatch point: so that these sprawling concentrations informally break up into suburbs and neighborhood self-help units, whose own local leaders are often motivated by ideals and ideologies originating from afar, by way of electronic communications technology. Radical Islam is, in part, the story of urbanization over the past half-century across North Africa and the Greater Middle East. Urbanization also accounts for the far more progressive demonstrators for democracy who overthrew various Arab regimes in 2011. Forget the image of the Arab as the nomad or inhabitant of an oasis on the steppe-desert. In most instances he is a city dweller, of a crowded and shabby city at that, and is at home in vast crowds. It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together
and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10

  A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.