TO THE MEMORY OF
HARVEY SICHERMAN
1945–2010
PRESIDENT,
FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE,
PHILADELPHIA
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book originated in a magazine article, the impetus for which came from the editors at Foreign Policy, notably Christian Brose and Susan Glasser. As the book developed, a shortened version of the China chapter ran as a cover story in Foreign Affairs, for which I thank James F. Hoge Jr., Gideon Rose, and Stephanie Giry. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington published a paper that was a shortened version of the India chapter, for which I thank Kristen Lord, vice president and director of studies there. In fact, the book could not have been completed without the institutional support I received from CNAS, for which I thank CEO Nathaniel Fick, President John Nagl, and Director of Development Venilde Jeronimo. Sections of the Preface are adapted from several previous books of mine, as noted on the copyright page. Throughout this editorial process, help and inspiration came from Jakub Grygiel at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. Other help came from Army Lieutenant General (Retired) Dave Barno, CNAS senior advisor Richard Fontaine, former CNAS researcher Seth Myers, Atlantic editors James Gibney and Yvonne Rolzhausen, Naval Academy professor Stephen Wrage, and Professor Brian W. Blouet of the College of William and Mary.
At Random House, my editor, Jonathan Jao, provided seasoned advice on all fronts. Kate Medina also provided encouragement. Once more, I thank my literary agents, Carl D. Brandt and Marianne Merola, for their assistance in helping to guide me from one project to another.
Elizabeth Lockyer, my assistant, worked on the maps. My wife, Maria Cabral, once again provided emotional support.
Notes
Preface: Frontiers
1. Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 85.
2. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. ix.
3. The province was later renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
4. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 56.
5. Golo Mann, The History of Germany Since 1789, translated by Marian Jackson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), pp. 525 and 880, 1987 Peregrine edition.
6. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 38, 41, 180, 187.
PART I: VISIONARIES
Chapter I: From Bosnia to Baghdad
1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, Washington, Summer 1989. Book version: The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
2. Jonathan C. Randal, “In Africa, Unrest in One-Party States,” International Herald Tribune, Paris, March 27, 1990.
3. Timothy Garton Ash, “Bosnia in Our Future,” New York Review of Books, December 21, 1995.
4. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980); Claudio Magris, Danube (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986, 1989), p. 268.
5. Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 51.
6. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Holt, 1998), p. 24.
7. Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1986.
8. W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 201; K. A. Sinnhuber, “Central Europe–Mitteleuropa–Europe Centrale: An Analysis of a Geographical Term,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 20, 1954; Arthur Butler Dugan, “Mackinder and His Critics Reconsidered,” The Journal of Politics, May 1962, p. 250.
9. Saul B. Cohen, Geography and Politics in a World Divided (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 79–83.
10. Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (Washington: National Defense University, 1919, 1942), p. 90.
11. Cohen, Geography and Politics in a World Divided, p. 222.
12. Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 37, 95, 176–77.
13. Michael Ignatieff, “Homage to Bosnia,” New York Review of Books, April 21, 1994.
14. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Modern Library, 1922, 1934), p. 697, 1990 Vintage edition.
15. Timothy Garton Ash, “Kosovo and Beyond,” New York Review of Books, June 24, 1999. He was referring to a line in Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” published in 1940.
16. Timothy Garton Ash, “Cry, the Dismembered Country,” New York Review of Books, January 14, 1999.
17. I have my own history regarding the story of these delayed interventions. My book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin’s) was reportedly a factor in President Bill Clinton’s decision not to militarily intervene in 1993, thus putting off the dispatch of NATO forces into the Balkans for two years. Balkan Ghosts, a record of my experiences in the Balkans in the 1980s, appeared first as works in progress in The Atlantic Monthly before the Berlin Wall fell. Then, in June 1991, Chapter 3 of Balkan Ghosts (about Macedonia) appeared in The Atlantic. According to a former State Department official, quoted in The Washington Post (February 21, 2002), that article was instrumental in getting “the first and only preventive deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia.” Though a 1990 CIA report warned of Yugoslavia disintegrating, the State Department “was in a state of denial … until Kaplan’s article came along.” As it happens, the deployment of 1,500 peacekeepers in Macedonia prevented violence that later broke out in Bosnia and Kosovo. Balkan Ghosts was published in book form in March 1993. That same month I published an article about Yugoslavia in Reader’s Digest, in which I wrote: “Unless we can break the cycle of hatred and revenge—by standing forcefully for self-determination and minority rights—the gains from the end of the Cold War will be lost. All aid, all diplomatic efforts, all force if force is used, must be linked to the simple idea that all the people of Yugoslavia deserve freedom from violence.” Soon after, I appeared on television to publicly urge intervention in the Balkans. I also urged intervention on the front page of The Washington Post’s Outlook section on April 17, 1994, more than a year before we finally intervened. Balkan Ghosts paints a grim picture of ethnic relations in southeastern Europe, but it is only the grimmest human landscapes where intervention has usually been required in the first place: one need never idealize a human landscape in order to take action on its behalf. And as we would learn later in Iraq, when you do intervene, you should do so without illusions. Though my books and articles were read by the president and others, at no point did anyone in the Clinton administration contact me in any way concerning my work, and how it might be applied to specific events and policy choices that arose after the book was completed.
18. Leon Wieseltier, “Force Without Force: Saving NATO, Losing Kosovo,” New Republic, Washington, April 26 and May 3, 1999.
19. Leon Wieseltier, “Winning Ugly: The War Ends, Sort Of. The Peace Begins, Sort Of,” New Republic, Washington, June 28, 1999.
20. Ibid.
21. Leon Wieseltier, “Useless,” New Republic, Washington, April 17, 2006.
22. Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 84–85.
23. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
24. Israel at the time of 9/11 was undergoing frequent terrorist attacks and so naturally was at the receiving end of American sympathy. Demands for it to freeze settlement activity in the occupied territories would resume later on, though. During the buildup to the Iraq War, I wrote that if Bush was successful in Iraq and achieved a second term, he should end �
��the domination by Israeli overlords of three million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” a situation which I called “particularly untenable.” “A Post-Saddam Scenario,” Atlantic Monthly, Boston, November 2002.
25. Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 84.
26. Hobbes and Berlin are great precisely because of their nuance. Hobbes’s philosophy may represent a grim view of humanity, but he was also a liberal modernizer, because at the time of his writings modernization meant the breakdown of the medieval order through the establishment of a central authority, which his Leviathan represented. Likewise Berlin, while the embodiment of liberal humanism, was also a realist who recognized, for example, that the search for sufficient food and shelter came before the search for freedom.
27. Actually, advance columns of American forces in the First Gulf War had come within 150 kilometers of Baghdad. But the bulk of the troops were based in Kuwait and the Saudi desert. Robert D. Kaplan, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” The Atlantic, April 2010.
Chapter II: The Revenge of Geography
1. Robert D. Kaplan, “Munich Versus Vietnam,” The Atlantic Online, May 4, 2007.
2. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, revised by Kenneth W. Thompson and W. David Clinton (New York: McGraw Hill, 1948, 2006), pp. 3, 6, 7, 12; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes (1629) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Anastasia Bakolas, “Human Nature in Thucydides,” Wellesley College, unpublished; Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2001).
3. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. xviii–xix, 37, 181, 218–20, 246, 248; William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), vol. 2, p. 211; John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Winter 1994–1995.
4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 15.
5. Fareed Zakaria, “Is Realism Finished?,” The National Interest, Winter 1992–1993.
6. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966), p. 321; José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 129.
7. Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 58, 173, 216.
8. Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideas and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1919), pp. 15–16, 1996 National Defense University edition.
9. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 165.
10. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effect Upon International Policies (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1900), p. 56, 2005 Elibron edition.
11. W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 93, 130–31.
12. W. Gordon East, The Geography Behind History (New York: Norton, 1965, 1967), p. 120.
13. Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, with a new introduction by Francis P. Sempa (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), pp. xv, 41. 2007 Transaction edition.
14. East, The Geography Behind History, p. 38.
15. Federalist No. 8.
16. Williamson Murray, “Some Thoughts on War and Geography,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 212, 214; Colin S. Gray, “The Continued Primacy of Geography,” Orbis, Philadelphia, Spring 1996, p. 2.
17. Mackubin Thomas Owens, “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics,” Naval War College Review, Newport, Rhode Island, Autumn 1999, p. 72.
18. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, p. 92.
19. James Fairgrieve, Geography and World Power (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917), pp. 273–74.
20. John Western, Department of Geography, Syracuse University.
21. John Gallup and Jeffrey Sachs, “Location, Location: Geography and Economic Development,” Harvard International Review, Cambridge, Winter 1998–1999. In part, they are extrapolating from the work of Jared Diamond.
22. M. C. Ricklefs, Bruce Lockhart, Albert Lau, Portia Reyes, and Maitrii Aung-Thwin, A New History of Southeast Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 21.
23. John Adams, Works (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–1856), vol. 4, p. 401.
24. Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 101–2.
25. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, p. 43.
26. Murray, “Some Thoughts on War and Geography,” p. 213.
27. Jakub J. Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 15.
28. Gray, “The Continued Primacy of Geography”; Murray, “Some Thoughts on War and Geography,” p. 216.
29. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 124.
30. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
31. See Daniel J. Mahoney’s “Three Decent Frenchmen,” a review of Tony Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility, The National Interest, Summer 1999; see, too, History, Truth and Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron, edited by Franciszek Draus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
32. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1, The Origins to 1795 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 [1981]), p. viii.
Chapter III: Herodotus and His Successors
1. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 22, 27.
2. Freya Stark, “Iraq,” in Islam To-day, edited by A. J. Arberry and Rom Landau (London: Faber & Faber, 1943).
3. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (1377), translated by Franz Rosenthal, 1967 Princeton University Press edition, pp. 133, 136, 140, 252; Robert D. Kaplan, Mediterranean Winter (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 27.
4. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), pp. 267, 284, 297, 299.
5. McNeill, The Rise of the West, pp. 32, 41–42, 46, 50, 64.
6. James Fairgrieve, Geography and World Power (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917), pp. 26–27, 30, 32.
7. McNeill, The Rise of the West, pp. 69, 71; Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 24–25.
8. McNeill, The Rise of the West, pp. 167, 217, 243.
9. Ibid., pp. 250, 484, 618.
10. Ibid., p. 535.
11. Arthur Helps, preface to 1991 abridged English-language edition of Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press).
12. Ibid., p. 249.
13. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1962 [1918, 1922]), pp. 324, 345, 352.
14. Ibid., pp. 177–78, 193–94, 353–54; Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of vols. 7–10 by D. C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 144–45.
15. Ibid., pp. 451, 539.
16. W. Gordon East, The Geography Behind History (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 128.
17. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of vols. 1–6 by D. C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 123, 237.
18. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 1–6, pp. 146, 164–66; Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), pp. 79, 81, 106–7, 109, 119–20, 136–37, 157, 159, 172, 247, 276.
19. By no means was Europe alone in this regard. For example, Toynbee notes how the inhabitants of the Andean plateau were challenged by a bleak climate and poor soil, even as the inhabitants of the Pacific coast of South America were challenged by heat and drought that necessitated irrigation works. The difference, though, between Europe and South America, which Toynbee does not indicate, is that Europe, with its natural deepwater ports,
lay athwart many trade and migration routes. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 1, p. 75.
20. McNeill, The Rise of the West, pp. 565, 724.
21. Ibid., p. 253.
22. Ibid., pp. 722, 724.
23. Ibid., p. 728.
24. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
25. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, revised by Kenneth W. Thompson and W. David Clinton (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), pp. 354–57.
26. Ibid., p. 357.
27. McNeill, The Rise of the West, p. 807.
28. Ibid, p. 352.
29. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 1–6, p. 284.
30. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 7–10, p. 121.
31. For examples of Eurocentric mapping conventions, see Jeremy Black, Maps and History, pp. 60, 62.
32. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 50, 56, 60–61, 109–11.
33. Ibid., pp. 114, 120–24, 133; Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 65, 71.
34. Hodgson, The Classical Age of Islam, pp. 154, 156, 158.
35. Ibid., pp. 151, 204–6, 229.
36. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 1–6, p. 271.
37. Ibid., p. 268. The Abyssinian highlands were more inaccessible still, and would remain under heavy Christian influence.
38. Hodgson, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods, pp. 54, 396, 400–401.
39. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 114, 116.
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