The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Kashmir, like Palestine, because of the effect of cyberspace and new media, could still fire hatred among millions, putting a solution to its tangle of problems further out of reach. For the very technologies that defeat geography also have the capability of enhancing geography’s importance. The subcontinent is a blunt geographical fact, but defining its borders will go on indefinitely.

  Whereas Chinese dynasties of old almost completely fall within the current borders of China, the dynasties to which India is heir, as we have seen, do not. Thus, India looks to Afghanistan and its other shadow zones with less serenity than does China to its shadow zones. India is a regional power to the degree that it is entrapped by this geography; it is a potential great power to the degree that it can move beyond it.

  Chapter XIII

  THE IRANIAN PIVOT

  As University of Chicago scholar William McNeill has told us, India, China, and Greece all lay “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” protected as they were by mountains, deserts, and sheer distance.1 Of course, this protection was partial, for as we know, Greece was ravaged by Persia, China by the Mongols and the Turkic steppe people, and India by a surfeit of Muslim invaders. Nevertheless, geography provided enough of a barrier for three great and unique civilizations to take root. Lying in the immense space between these civilizations, as noted in an earlier chapter, was what McNeill’s Chicago colleague Marshall Hodgson referred to as the Oikoumene, an antique Greek term for the “inhabited quarter” of the world: this is Herodotus’s world, the parched temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass stretching from North Africa to the margins of western China, a belt of territory Hodgson also calls Nile-to-Oxus.2

  Hodgson’s vision captures brilliantly several key and contradictory facts: that the Oikoumene—the Greater Middle East—is an easily definable zone existing between Greece, China, and India, distinctly separate from all three, even as it has had pivotal influence on each of them, so that the relationships are extremely organic; and that whereas the Greater Middle East is united by Islam and the legacies of horse and camel nomadism—as opposed to the crop agriculture of China and India—it is also deeply divided within by rivers, oases, and highlands, with great ramifications for political organization to this day. The disparity between the Greater Middle East and China, say, is especially telling. John King Fairbank, the late Harvard China expert, writes:

  The cultural homogeneity of ancient China as revealed by the archaeological record contrasts remarkably with the multiplicity and diversity of peoples, states, and cultures in the ancient Middle East. Beginning about 3000 B.C., Egyptians, Sumerians, Semites, Akkadians, Amorites … Assyrians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and others jostled one another in a bewildering flux of … warfare and politics. The record is one of pluralism with a vengeance. Irrigation helped agriculture in several centers—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus valleys.… Languages, writing systems, and religions proliferated.3

  This classical legacy of division remains with us most profoundly across the chasm of the millennia, and is therefore crucial to the volatile politics of the Greater Middle East today. While Arabic has come to unify much of the region, Persian and Turkish predominate in the northern plateau regions, and this is not to mention the many languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus. As Hodgson shows, many individual Middle Eastern states, while products of arbitrary, colonial-era map drawing, also have a sturdy basis in antiquity, that is, in geography. Yet the very multiplicity of these states, as well as the religious, ideological, and democratizing forces that operate within them, further reify their designation as part of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s debatable ground. Indeed, the supreme fact of twenty-first-century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is also the most unstable.

  In the Middle East we have, in the words of the scholars Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, a “vast quadrilateral,” where Europe, Russia, Asia, and Africa intersect: with the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert to the west; the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and the Central Asian steppe-land to the north; the Hindu Kush and the Indian Subcontinent to the east; and the Indian Ocean to the south.4 Unlike China or Russia, this quadrilateral does not constitute one massive state; nor, like the Indian Subcontinent, is it even overwhelmingly dominated by one state, which might provide it with at least some semblance of coherence. Nor is it, like Europe, a group of states within highly regulated alliance structures (NATO, the European Union). Rather, the Middle East is characterized by a disorderly and bewildering array of kingdoms, sultanates, theocracies, democracies, and military-style autocracies, whose common borders look formed as if by an unsteady knife. To no surprise of the reader, this whole region, which includes North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, and, to a degree, the Indian Subcontinent, constitutes, in effect, one densely packed axis of instability, where continents, historic road networks, and sea lanes converge. What is more, this region comprises 70 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40 percent of its natural gas reserves.5 Too, this region is prone to all the pathologies mentioned by Yale professor Paul Bracken: extremist ideologies, crowd psychology, overlapping missile ranges, and profit-driven mass media as dedicated to their point of view as Fox News is to its. In fact, with the exception of the Korean Peninsula, nuclear proliferation is more of a factor in the Middle East than in any other area.

  The Middle East is also in the midst of a youth bulge, in which 65 percent of the population is under the age of thirty. Between 1995 and 2025, the populations of Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Yemen will have doubled. Young populations, as we have seen in the Arab Spring, are the most likely to force upheaval and change. The next generation of Middle Eastern rulers, whether in Iran or in the Arab states, will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as their predecessors, even as democratic experiments in the region show that while elections are easily accomplished, stable and liberal democratic orders are processes that can take generations to refine. In the Middle East, youth bulges and the communications revolution have ignited a string of messy, Mexico-style scenarios (the replacement of decisive one-party states with more chaotic multifactional and multiparty ones), but without Mexico’s level of institutionalization, which, as limited as it is, remains ahead of most countries in the Middle East. Dealing with an authentically democratic Mexico has been harder for the United States than with a Mexico under effective one-party rule. Bristling with advanced armaments, to say nothing of weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East of the next few decades will make the recent era of Arab-Israeli state conflict seem almost like a romantic, sepia-toned chapter of the Cold War and Post Cold War, in which calculations of morality and strategic advantage were relatively clear-cut.

  Hodgson’s Nile-to-Oxus essentially means Egypt to Central Asia, with Egypt as shorthand for all of North Africa. This terminology comprises both the southern, desert-and-plains component of the Middle East, which is Arab, and the northern mountainous tableland, which is non-Arab, and which begins by the Black Sea and ends by the Indian Subcontinent. The sprawling northern plateau region might also be dubbed Bosporus-to-Indus. Bosporus-to-Indus has been heavily influenced by migrations from Central Asia; Nile-to-Oxus by that, too, as well as by heavy sea traffic in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The fact that the Middle East is the intersection point of continents, with an internal geography more intricate than any save Europe, but vaster and spread across twice as many time zones as Europe, makes it necessary for the sake of this discussion to disaggregate the region into constituent parts. Obviously, electronic communications and air travel have overcome geography in recent times, so that crises are defined by political interactions across the entire region. For example, the Israelis intercept a flotilla carrying relief supplies for Gaza and crowds in Turkey, Iran, and throughout the Arab world are inflamed. A fruit and vegetable vendor in south-central Tunisia immolates himself and n
ot only does Tunisia erupt in demonstrations against dictatorial rule, but also much of the Arab world. Still, much can be discerned by studying the map and its inherent divisions.

  When looking at a map of the Middle East, three geographical features stand out above others: the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian plateau, and the Anatolian land bridge.

  The Arabian Peninsula is dominated by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, yet it also includes other important countries. In fact, Saudi Arabia, with a population of only 28.7 million, contains much less than half of all the peninsula’s inhabitants. But Saudi Arabia’s annual population growth rate is nearly 2 percent: if that high rate continues, its population will double in a few decades, putting enormous strain on resources, given that the country is located on steppe-land and water-starved desert. Close to 40 percent of Saudis are under fifteen years of age. Forty percent of Saudi Arabia’s young men are unemployed. The political pressures arising from such a young population for jobs and education will be immense. Saudi Arabia’s power derives not from the size of its population, which in fact is a liability, but from the fact that it leads the world in oil reserves, with 262 billion barrels, and is fourth in the world in natural gas reserves, with 240 trillion cubic feet.

  The geographical cradle of the Saudi state, and of the extreme Sunni religious movement known as Wahhabism associated with it, is Najd: an arid region in the center of the Arabian Peninsula, lying between the Great al-Nafud Desert to the north and the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter to the south: to the east is the coastal strip of the Persian Gulf; to the west the mountains of Hijaz. The word “Najd” means upland. And its general elevation varies from five thousand feet in the west to under 2,500 feet in the east. The late-nineteenth-century British explorer and Arabist Charles M. Doughty described Najd thus:

  The shrieking suany and noise of tumbling water is, as it were, the lamentable voice of a rainless land in all Nejd villages. Day and night this labour of the water may not be intermitted. The strength of oxen cannot profitably draw wells of above three or four fathoms and, if God had not made the camel, Nejd, they say, had been without inhabitant.6

  Najd is truly the heart of what Hodgson called camel-based nomadism. It was from the bastion of Najd that Wahhabi fanatics in recent centuries set off on raids in all directions. Though the Hijaz, adjacent to the Red Sea, held the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Wahhabist Najdis considered the pilgrimages to the various holy places (with the exception of the haj to the Kaaba in Mecca) to be a form of paganism. While the holy cities of Mecca and Medina connote Muslim religiosity in the Western mind, the truth is somewhat the opposite: it is the very pilgrimage of Muslims from all over the Islamic world that lends a certain cosmopolitanism to these holy cities and to the surrounding Hijaz. The Hijaz, “with its young, urbane, religiously varied population, has never fully accommodated to Saudi and Wahabi rule,” writes career CIA officer Bruce Riedel.7 The people of the Hijaz look to the Red Sea, Egypt, and Syria for cultural sustenance, not to the austere desert of Najd with its Wahhabis. The core fact of this history is that the Wahhabis were unable to hold permanently the peripheries of the Arabian Peninsula, even as their adversaries found it equally difficult to hold the heartland of Najd. The Saudi Arabia that exists today, while a tribute to the vision and skills of one man in the first half of the twentieth century, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud—the Najdi who conquered Hijaz in 1925—holds true to this geographical design.8 The state is focused on Najd and its capital, Riyadh, and does not include the seaboard skeikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, nor Oman and Yemen.

  The fundamental danger to Najd-based Saudi Arabia is Yemen. Though Yemen has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s land area, its population is almost as large, so that the all-important demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula is in its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sand castle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since antiquity. The Ottoman Turks and the British never really controlled Yemen. Like Nepal and Afghanistan, Yemen, because it was never truly colonized, did not develop strong bureaucratic institutions. When I traveled in the Saudi-Yemeni border area some years back it was crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, even as the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible. Estimates of the number of firearms within Yemen’s borders go as high as eighty million—almost three for every Yemeni. I will never forget what an American military expert told me in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a: “In Yemen you’ve got well over twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hardworking compared with the Saudis next door. It’s the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh.”

  Saudi Arabia is synonymous with the Arabian Peninsula in the way that India is synonymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by vast waterless tracts. Thus, highways and domestic air links are crucial to Saudi Arabia’s cohesion. While India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on loyalty to an extended family. And yet whereas India is virtually surrounded by semi-dysfunctional states, Saudi Arabia’s borders disappear into harmless desert to the north, and are shielded by (in the most part, Bahrain excepted) sturdy, well-governed, self-contained sheikhdoms to the east and southeast: sheikhdoms that, in turn, are products of history and geography. It was because the territories of present-day Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all lay along the trade route of the nineteenth century’s greatest maritime power, Great Britain, and particularly along its route to India, that Britain negotiated deals with its skeikhs that led to their independence following World War II. Large oil deposits tell the rest of the story of these “Eldorado States,” in the words of British Arabist Peter Mansfield.9

  In sum, within the Arabian Peninsula, it remains in the highly populous southwest where Saudi Arabia is really vulnerable: from where weapons, explosives, and the narcotic leaf qat flow in from across the Yemeni border. The future of teeming, tribalized Yemen will go a long way to determining the future of Saudi Arabia, and geography perhaps more than ideas has much to do with it.

  The Iranian plateau, on the other hand, is synonymous with only one country: Iran. Iran’s population of 74 million is two and a half times that of Saudi Arabia, and is along with Turkey’s and Egypt’s the largest in the Middle East. Moreover, Iran has impressively gotten its population growth rate down to way below one percent, with only 22 percent of its population below the age of fifteen. Thus, Iran’s population is not a burden like Saudi Arabia’s, but an asset. One could argue that, for example, Turkey has an even bigger population, a similarly low population growth rate, and a higher literacy rate. Moreover, Turkey has a stable agricultural economy and is more industrialized than Iran. I will deal with Turkey later. For the moment, note that Turkey is situated to the northwest of Iran, closer to Europe and much further away from major Sunni Arab population centers. Turkey also is in the bottom ranks of hydrocarbon producers. Iran is number three in the world in oil reserves, with 133 billion barrels, but number two in natural gas reserves, with 970 trillion cubic feet. Yet it is Iran’s locational advantage, just to the south of Mackinder’s Heartland, and inside Spykman’s Rimland, that, more than any other factor, is truly something to behold.

  Virtually all of the Greater Middle East’s oil and natural gas lies either in the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea regions. Just as shipping lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines radiate and will radiate from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China, and the Indian Ocean. The only country that straddles both energy-producing areas is Iran, stretching as it does from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf.10 The Persian Gulf possesses by some accounts 55 percent of the world’s crude oil reserves, and Iran dominates the whole Gulf, from the Shatt al Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz 615 miles away. Because of
its bays, inlets, coves, and islands—excellent places for hiding suicide, tanker-ramming speedboats—Iran’s coastline inside the Strait of Hormuz is 1,356 nautical miles; the next longest, that of the United Arab Emirates, is only 733 nautical miles. Iran also has 300 miles of Arabian Sea frontage, including the port of Chah Bahar near the Pakistani border. This makes Iran vital to providing warm water access to the landlocked Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Iranian coast of the Caspian in the far north, wreathed by thickly forested mountains, stretches for nearly four hundred miles from Astara in the west, on the border with former Soviet Azerbaijan, around to Bandar-e Torkaman in the east, by the border with Turkmenistan.

  A look at the relief map of Eurasia shows something more. The broad back of the Zagros Mountains sweeps down through Iran from Anatolia in the northwest to Baluchistan in the southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the roads are all open to Mesopotamia. When British area specialist and travel writer Freya Stark explored Iranian Luristan in the Zagros Mountains in the early 1930s, she naturally based herself out of Baghdad, not Tehran.11 To the east and northeast, the roads are open to Khorasan and the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and Kyzyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan respectively. For just as Iran straddles the rich energy fields of both the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, it also straddles the Middle East proper and Central Asia. No Arab country can make that claim (just as no Arab country sits astride two energy-producing areas). In fact, the Mongol invasion of Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum, and destroyed the qanat irrigation system, was that much more severe precisely because of Iran’s Central Asian prospect. Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia is potentially vast, even as these same former Soviet republics, because of ethnic compatriots in northern Iran, could theoretically destabilize the Iranian state. Whereas Azerbaijan on Iran’s northwestern border contains roughly eight million Azeri Turks, there are twice that number in Iran’s neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and Tehran. The Azeris were cofounders of the Iranian polity. The first Shiite shah of Iran (Ismail in 1501) was an Azeri Turk. There are important Azeri businessmen and ayatollahs in Iran. The point is that whereas Iran’s influence to the west in nearby Turkey and the Arab world is well established, its influence to the north and east is equally profound; and if the future brings less repressive regimes both in Iran and in the southern, Islamic tier of the former Soviet Union, Iran’s influence could deepen still with more cultural and political interactions.