The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  University of New Mexico professor Charles Truxillo predicts that by 2080 the Southwestern states of the U.S. and the northern states of Mexico will band together to form a new country, “La República del Norte.” By 2000, six of twelve important cities on the U.S. side of the border were over 90 percent Hispanic, and only two (San Diego, California, and Yuma, Arizona) were less than 50 percent Hispanic.30

  The blurring of America’s Southwestern frontier is becoming a geographical fact that all the security devices on the actual border itself cannot invalidate. Nevertheless, while I admire Huntington’s ability to isolate and expose a fundamental dilemma that others in academia and the media are too polite to address, I do not completely agree with his conclusions. Huntington believes in a firm reliance on American nationalism in order to preserve its Anglo-Protestant culture and values in the face of the partial Latinoization of our society. I believe that while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set contours on what is achievable and what isn’t. And the organic connection between Mexico and America—geographical, historical, and demographic—is simply too overwhelming to suppose that, as Huntington hopes, American nationalism can stay as pure as it is. Huntington correctly derides cosmopolitanism (and imperialism, too) as elite visions. But a certain measure of cosmopolitanism, Huntington to the contrary, is inevitable and not to be disparaged.

  America, I believe, will actually emerge in the course of the twenty-first century as a Polynesian-cum-mestizo civilization, oriented from north to south, from Canada to Mexico, rather than as an east to west, racially lighter-skinned island in the temperate zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.31 This multiracial assemblage will be one of sprawling suburban city-states, each in a visual sense progressively similar to the next, whether Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest or Omaha-Lincoln in Nebraska, each nurturing its own economic relationships with cities and trading networks throughout the world, as technology continues to collapse distances. America, in my vision, would become the globe’s preeminent duty-free hot zone for business transactions, a favorite place of residence for the global elite. In the tradition of Rome, it will continue to use its immigration laws to asset-strip the world of its best and brightest, and to further diversify an immigrant population that, as Huntington fears, is defined too much by Mexicans. In this vision, nationalism will be, perforce, diluted a bit, but not so much as to deprive America of its unique identity, or to undermine its military. In short, America is no longer an island, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific. It is brought closer to the rest of the world not only by technology, but by the pressures of Mexican and Central American demography.

  But this vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If President Calderón and his successors can succeed in the mission to break the back of the drug cartels once and for all (a very difficult prospect, to say the least) then the United States will have achieved a strategic victory greater than any possible in the Middle East. A stable and prosperous Mexico, working in organic concert with the United States, would be an unbeatable combination in geopolitics. A post-cartel Mexico, combined with a stabilized and pro-American Colombia (now almost a fact), would fuse together the Western Hemisphere’s largest, third largest, and fourth largest countries in terms of population, easing America’s continued sway over Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. In a word, Bacevich is correct in his inference: fixing Mexico is more important than fixing Afghanistan.

  Unfortunately, as Bacevich claims, Mexico is a possible disaster that our concentration on the Greater Middle East has diverted us from; and if it stays that way, it will lead to more immigration, legal and especially illegal, that will create the scenario that Huntington fears. Calderón’s offensive against the drug lords has claimed 47,000 lives since 2006, with close to 4,000 victims in the first half of 2010 alone. Moreover, the cartels have graduated to military-style assaults, with complex traps set and escape routes closed off. “These are war-fighting tactics they’re using,” concludes Javier Cruz Angulo, a Mexican security expert. “It’s gone way beyond the normal strategies of organized crime.” Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, writes: “If that trend persists, it is an extremely worrisome development for the health, perhaps even the viability, of the Mexican state.” The weaponry used by the cartels is generally superior to that of the Mexican police and comparable to that of the Mexican military. Coupled with military-style tactics, the cartels can move, in Carpenter’s words, “from being mere criminal organizations to being a serious insurgency.” United Nations peacekeepers have deployed in places with less violence than Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. Already, police officers and local politicians are resigning their posts for fear of assassination, and Mexican business and political elites are sending their families out of the country, even as there is sustained middle- and upper-middle-class flight to the United States.32

  Mexico is now at a crossroads: it is either in the early phase of finally taking on the cartels, or it is sinking into further disorder; or both. Because its future hangs in the balance, what the United States does could be pivotal. But while this is happening, the U.S. security establishment has been engaged in other notoriously corrupt and unstable societies half a world away, Iraq until 2011 and Afghanistan at least until 2014.

  Unlike those places, the record of U.S. military involvement in the Mexican border area is one of reasonable success. Even as proximity to Mexico threatens the United States demographically, it helps in a logistical sense when trying to control the border. As Danelo points out, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States and Mexico reduced banditry on the border through binational cooperation. From 1881 to 1910, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz joined with American presidents to jointly patrol the border. Mexican rurales rode with Texas Rangers in pursuing the Comanche. In Arizona, Mexican and American soldiers mounted joint campaigns against Apaches. Today, the job of thwarting drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain in the mountains and steppe reaching back from Ciudad Juárez is a job for the military, quietly assisting Mexican authorities, but the legal framework for such cooperation does not exist, partly because of strict interpretation of nineteenth-century posse comitatus laws on the U.S. side.33 While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

  Surely, one can argue that, with Herculean border controls, a functional and nationalist America can coexist alongside a dysfunctional and partially chaotic Mexico. But that is mainly true in the short run. In the long run, looking deep into the twenty-first century and beyond, again, as Toynbee notes, a border between a highly developed society and a less highly developed society will not attain an equilibrium, but will advance in the more backward society’s favor. In other words, the preservation of American nationalism to the degree that would satisfy Huntington is unachievable unless Mexico reaches First World status. And if Mexico does reach First World status, then it might become less of a threat, and the melding of the two societies only quickens. Either way, because of the facts that the map imposes, we are headed for a conjoining of Mexico and America in some form; though, of course, the actions of policymakers on both sides of the border can determine on what terms and under what circumstances that occurs. Here is Toynbee:

  The erection of a [Roman] limes sets in motion a play of social forces which is bound to end disastrously for the builders. A policy of non-intercourse with the barbarians beyond is quite impracticable. Whatever the imperial government may decide, the interests of traders, pioneers, adventurers, and so forth will inevitably draw them beyond the frontier.34

  Toynbee also writes that “a universal state is imposed by its founders, and accepted by its subjects, as a panacea for the ills of a Time of Troubl
es.” He mentions “Middle Empire” Egypt, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Achaemenid Persia, the Seleucid Monarchy, the Roman Peace, and the Pax Hanica in the Sinic world as all examples of essentially universal states in which different peoples and confessions coexisted for mutual benefit. Rome, in particular, mastered the vexing issue of dual loyalty, with citizenship of the world-city of Rome and of the particular local territory not in contradiction.35 It may be, therefore, that a universal state will on some future morrow prove the panacea for the Time of Troubles now afflicting northern Mexico and the American Southwest in the border region.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of such a monumental shift in the conception of national myth and sovereignty, even as it occurs as we speak in what, by the standards of the media, is geological time. When I hitchhiked across the United States in 1970, I palpably experienced how no other continent has been as well suited to nation building as the temperate zone of North America. The Appalachians had provided a western boundary for a nascent community of states through the end of the eighteenth century, but river valleys cutting through these mountains, such as the Mohawk and the Ohio, allowed for penetration of the West by settlers. Beyond the Appalachians the settlers found a flat panel of rich farmland without geographical impediments where, in the nineteenth century, wealth could be created and human differences ground down to form a distinctive American culture. The Greater Mississippi basin together with the Intercoastal Waterway has more miles of navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined, and it overlays the world’s largest contiguous piece of arable earth. By the time westering pioneers reached a truly daunting barrier—the Great American Desert, both east and west of the Rocky Mountains—the transcontinental railroad was at hand.36 “The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined … the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live,” notes a Stratfor document.37 When the geographer Arnold Guyot examined the continental United States in 1849, before the Civil War and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, he regarded it along with Europe and Asia as one of the “continental cores” that were destined to control the world. But he believed back then that America would lead the way over the other two cores. The reasons: America was protected behind a “screen of ocean” on two sides that, nevertheless, allowed it to interact with Eurasia; and its development was assured by the “interconnectibility of the well-watered interior” of the continent.38 “Here, then, is the United States,” writes James Fairgrieve in 1917,

  taking its place in the circle of lands, a new orbis terrarium; and yet outside the [Eurasian] system which has hitherto mattered, compact and coherent, with enormous stores of energy, facing Atlantic and Pacific, having relations with east and west of Euro-Asia, preparing by a fortified Panama Canal to fling her one fleet into either ocean.39

  That continental majesty, framed by two oceans, is still there. But another conceptual geography is beginning to overlap with it, that of Coronado’s 1540–1542 journey of exploration from central-western Mexico north through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Whereas Lewis and Clark’s 1804–1806 exploration of the Louisiana and Oregon territories brought America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and thus laid the ideational foundation of a modern, continental nation-state, Coronado’s exploration—south-to-north rather than east-to-west—while earlier in time, was in its own way postmodern: for it was not bounded by any national consciousness, and provided an orientation for a future universal state stretching from semitropical Mexico to temperate North America. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was in search of gold, plunder, and easy wealth. His was a medieval mentality. But the new Hispanic migrants heading north are not medieval. They are in search of jobs—which often entail backbreaking manual labor—and thus they are willing to work hard for material gain. They are being transformed by the Anglo-Protestant work ethic just as they transform America’s Anglo-Protestant culture.

  The quality and fluidity of this cultural and binational interaction will, arguably, more than any other individual dynamic, determine how well America interacts with Mackinder’s World-Island (Eurasia and Africa). American foreign policy will likely be both wise and unwise by turns in the course of the decades. But American economic power, cultural power, moral power, and even political and military power will be substantially affected by whether we can develop into a cohesive, bilingual supra-state-of-sorts with Mexico and Canada or, instead, become trapped by a dysfunctional, vast, and increasingly unruly border region that engenders civilizational tension between America’s still dominant Anglo-Protestant culture and its Hispanic counterpart. Huntington’s fears are justified; it is his solution that is partly wrong.

  Keep in mind that, as we know from Paul Bracken and others, the earth’s political geography increasingly constitutes a closed, claustrophobic system. Cultural and political interchanges across the seas will become more and more organic. Thus, if the United States and Mexico do not eventually come together to the degree that the U.S. and Canada already have—if we do not have Mexico as an intimate and dependable ally in world forums—it will adversely affect America’s other relationships, especially as Mexico’s (and Central America’s) population grows at a much higher rate than ours, and thus Mexico will assume more importance as time goes on. Braudel’s exploration of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean makes clear the role that natural forces like geography play over time: that is why Mexico must play a central function in any grand strategy we decide upon.

  Think of the future world as roughly resembling the millet system of the old Ottoman Empire: a “network of geographically intermingled communities,” in Toynbee’s words, rather than a “patchwork of … segregated parochial states.”40 Each relationship will affect the others as never before. As we have seen, future decades will see rail, road, and pipelines connecting all of Eurasia through a Central Asian and particularly an Afghan hub. An organic and united Eurasia will demand as a balancer an organic and united North America, from the Canadian Arctic to the Central American jungles. Not to continue to deepen links with Mexico and Central America, whose combined populations account for half the population of that of the United States, would be to see Mexico and perhaps some of its southern neighbors slip into a hostile diplomatic and political orbit in a world where Eurasia will be closer than ever before. The way to guard against a pro-Iranian Venezuela and other radical states that may emerge from time to time in the Western Hemisphere is to wrap the Greater Caribbean into a zone of free trade and human migration that, perforce, would be American dominated, as Mexico’s and Central America’s younger populations supply the labor force for America’s aging one. Of course, this is happening already, but the intensity of the human exchange will, and should, increase.

  “Global war, as well as global peace,” writes Nicholas Spykman, “means that all fronts and all areas are interrelated. No matter how remote they are from each other, success or failure in one will have an immediate and determining effect on the others.”41 That is far truer today than it was in 1944 when that statement was published posthumously. It will be far truer in the future. Robert Strausz-Hupé notes, “The history of Greece is the struggle for survival against the cyclic irruptions of Asia.”42 Think of how close ancient Greece was to Persia, and one may get a sense of how close we are to Eurasia now, given the revolution in transportation and communications. Making sure that one power in the Eastern Hemisphere does not become unduly dominant, so as to threaten the United States in the Western Hemisphere, will be a much easier task if we advance unity in the Western Hemisphere in the first place.

  We must be a balancing power in Eurasia and a unifying power in North America—doing both will be easier than doing just one. Preserving the balance of power, of course, must be done for a specific purpose that goes beyond the physical and economic protection of the United States. And that purpose is to use the stability guaranteed by a balance of power in the Eastern Hemisp
here to advance nothing less than the liberal intellectual cause of a Mitteleuropa writ large across the globe. Just as Stephen Dedalus affirms “his significance as a conscious rational animal,” in effect resisting fate, we must never give in to geography, but must fundamentally be aware of it in our quest for a better world. For the yearning after the Post Cold War ideal of a cosmopolitan Central Europe which informed the beginning of this study is where we are at the end of it. Whether or not that goal is achievable, it is something always worth striving for, hopefully with Mexico by our side. Mackinder intuited this in his call for vibrant and independent buffer states between Maritime Europe and the Heartland, noting that a world balanced is a world free.