The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Hodgson, like his colleague in the Chicago history department McNeill, is less an academic in the contemporary sense than an old-world intellectual aided by the rigor of tireless, scientifically minded inquiry, an outgrowth perhaps of his particular Quaker intensity. That is, even in the depths of his exploration of minutiae, he sees the grand sweep. His main stage is the ancient Greek Oikoumene, which also, as it happens, forms much of the material for McNeill’s world history, and as we’ve said, much of the background for Herodotus’s fifth-century B.C. Histories. It may be no accident that this is precisely the world which occupies current news headlines: that region between the eastern Mediterranean and the Iranian-Afghan plateau. For the Oikoumene is where the Eurasian and African landmasses converge, with many outlets to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, making it ultra-strategic, as well as a stew of migration patterns and consequently clashing ethnic and sectarian groups. Herodotus’s Histories captures this unceasing turbulence.

  Herodotus is at the heart of my argument for the relevance of McNeill and Hodgson in the twenty-first century. For this Greek, who was born a Persian subject sometime between 490 and 484 B.C. in Halicarnassus, in southwestern Asia Minor, maintains in his narrative about the origins and execution of the war between the Greeks and the Persians the perfect balance between geography and the decisions of men. He advances the partial determinism we all need. For he shows us a world where the relief map hovers in the background—Greece and Persia and their respective barbarian penumbrae in the Near East and North Africa—even as individual passions are acted out with devastating political results. Herodotus stands for the sensibility we need to recover in order to be less surprised by the world to come.

  “Custom is king of all,” Herodotus observes, quoting Pindar. Herodotus tells of the Egyptians, who shaved their eyebrows in mourning for a beloved cat, of Libyan tribesmen who wore their hair long on one side and shorn on the other, and smeared their bodies with vermilion. There are the Massagetae, a people who lived east of the Caspian Sea, in what is now Turkmenistan, among whom, when a man grows old, “his relatives come together and kill him, and sheep and goats along with him, and stew all the meat together and have a banquet of it.” First there is only the landscape, the historical experience of a people on it, and the manners and ideas that arise out of that experience. Herodotus is a preserver of the memory of civilizations and their geographies, the myths, fables, and even lies that they lived by. He knows that the better a knack a political leader has for just what’s out there, the less likely he is to make tragic mistakes. The Scythians lived on the far side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, where it is so cold that to make mud in the winter they had to light a fire. As Artabanus warns Darius, the Persian king, to no avail: Do not make war against the Scythians—a swiftly mobile and nomadic people without cities or sown land, who offer no focal point of attack for a large, well-equipped army.40

  Herodotus’s signal strength is his powerful evocation of just what human beings are capable of believing. It is a belief made tangible by the fact that the ancients, living without science and technology, saw and heard differently—more vividly than we do. Landscape and geography were real to them in ways we cannot imagine.

  Take the story of Phidippides, a professional runner sent from Athens to Sparta as a herald to plead for help against the Persians. Phidippides tells the Athenians that on Mount Parthenium, en route to Sparta, he saw the god Pan, who bade him ask his countrymen: “Why do you pay no heed to Pan, who is a good friend to the people of Athens, has been many times serviceable to you, and will be so again?” The Athenians are convinced that Phidippides has told the truth, and when their fortunes improved, they set up a shrine to Pan under the Acropolis.

  This is more than just a charming story; it may well be the truth as the Athenians related it to Herodotus. The runner probably believed he saw Pan. He did see Pan. A vision of the god was likely, given his fatigue, the pantheon inherent in his belief system, and the wonder-filled fear of the physical elements that has since been lost to human beings. The ancient world was “settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man,” Boris Pasternak writes in Doctor Zhivago. “Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.”41 If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently defending ourselves against—religious movements that reverse the Enlightenment and affect today’s geopolitics. For while space across the planet has filled up, and the natural world is not what it was, the new geography of slums and shantytowns and neither-nor landscapes likewise manifest an equally intense psychological effect on human beings, in a different way of course. And to understand this new geography, the premium it puts on space, and its consequent psychic impact it helps to first appreciate the antique landscapes as described by Herodotus.42

  The crux of Herodotus’s Histories is the lure of that seething-with-culture archipelagic landmass of Greece, lurking just to the west beyond the mountainous tablelands of Persia and Asia Minor. Here is geographical determinism writ large, it would seem, for the peoples of Asia to the east and Greece to the west have fought each other over the millennia, culminating in our own day with the tense relations between Greece and Turkey: a tension that has not led to outright war since the 1920s mainly because of the mass transfers of population that occurred in that decade, creating two neat, uniethnic states. Peace reigned, in other words, only after ethnic cleansing that went according to the dictates of geography. And yet this is ultimately not the line of thinking that Herodotus imparts.

  For Herodotus evinces a receptivity to the province of the heart and the attendant salience of human intrigues. He illustrates how self-interest is calculated within a disfiguring whirlwind of passion. Atossa, a wife of Persia’s King Darius, appeals to her husband’s male vanity in bed while begging him to invade Greece. She does this as a favor to the Greek doctor who has cured a growth on her breast, and who wants to revisit his homeland. It is all about geography, until it becomes all about Shakespeare.

  Herodotus’s Histories at its deepest level is about understanding the complexities of fate: moira in Greek, “the dealer-out of portions.” And because heroes are the ones who overcome fate, they form the superstructure of Herodotus’s narrative. It is none other than Hodgson who notes in his introduction to The Venture of Islam:

  Herodotus wrote his history, he said, to preserve the memory of the great deeds done by the Greeks and the Persians: unrepeatable deeds that have an enduring claim to our respect. Those deeds cannot be imitated, though they may be emulated and in some sense perhaps surpassed. But even now we dare call no man great whose deeds cannot somehow measure up to theirs.43

  Hodgson writes this early in his epic to make it clear that men ultimately have control over their destiny, even as he will often engage for three volumes in the description of grand historical and environmental trends over which, it might seem, individuals have little control. Without the admission of individual struggle, there is no humanism in the study of history, Hodgson says. Thus, he weaves his tapestry of Islam: “a morally, humanly relevant complex of traditions” that assumes the nature of a global force, but started with the actions of individuals in Mecca.

  So we are back to the battle against fate, and it is well that we are. For we now need to be especially fortified by the likes of Herodotus, Hodgson, and McNeill, since we are about to enter exceedingly rough terrain: that of geopolitics and the quasi-determinist theories that emanate from it. The fact is, the broad outlines of history have, indeed, been predicted, and might still be again. This is, to say the least, unsettling given how individuals can alter history. But, as we shall see, it is true. The men I am about to introduce should make liberal humanists profoundly uneasy. These men were hardly philosophers: rather, they were geographers, historians, and strategists who assumed that the
map determined nearly everything, leaving relatively little room for human agency. Human agency, to the degree that it did matter to them, mattered mainly in regards to military and commercial dominance. Yet it is such men with whom we now have to engage, so as to establish the framework for what we are up against around the world, and what can be achieved in it.

  Chapter IV

  THE EURASIAN MAP

  Times of global upheaval, testing as they do our assumptions about the permanence of the political map, lead to a renaissance in thinking about geography. This is particularly so because geography is the very basis for strategy and geopolitics. Strategy as defined by Napoleon is the art of using time and space in a military and diplomatic manner. Geopolitics constitutes the study of the outside environment faced by every state when determining its own strategy: that environment being the presence of other states also struggling for survival and advantage.1 In short, geopolitics is the influence of geography upon human divisions.2 As Napoleon said, to know a nation’s geography is to know its foreign policy.3

  Morgenthau calls geopolitics a “pseudoscience” because it erects “the factor of geography into an absolute.” Writing soon after World War II, he had in mind the great British geographer Halford Mackinder, whose turn-of-the-twentieth-century theories were revived in the midst of the Second World War and misused by the Nazis to justify their idea of Lebensraum, or German “living space.”4 To be sure, because the aim of geopolitics is to achieve a balance of power, and the Nazis attempted nothing less than to overthrow the balance of power, the Nazis’ use of Mackinder was a perversion of Mackinder’s own thinking. The balance of power, according to Mackinder, because it grants each nation its security, forms the very basis of freedom.5 Morgenthau may be too hard on Mackinder. In any case, Morgenthau’s aversion to Mackinder, as well as his careful summary of Mackinder’s theories, is itself an indication of Mackinder’s powerful influence over Western geopolitical thought over many decades. Mackinder keeps getting denounced, and yet remains relevant through it all, especially in eras like our own, with large numbers of American troops still on the ground in the Greater Middle East and Northeast Asia. Clearly, there is some unsettling, underlying truth to his work, though there is also the risk of taking it too far.

  Mackinder clearly had a gift. The dictum of his life’s work was that geography is the generalist’s answer to academic specialization.6 In 1890, he gave a singular example of how knowledge of geography enriches one’s thinking on world affairs:

  Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7

  Mackinder’s ideas and way of putting things, as we shall now see, are riveting.

  Sir Halford J. Mackinder, the father of modern-day geopolitics, which Morgenthau so disparages, is famous not for a book, but for a single article, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” published in the April 1904 issue of The Geographical Journal in London. Mackinder’s thesis is that Central Asia, helping to form as it does the Eurasian Heartland, is the pivot on which the fate of great world empires rests: for the earth’s very layout of natural arteries between mountain ranges and along river valleys encourages the rise of empires, declared or undeclared, rather than states. Before exploring how this notion, slightly redefined, helps illuminate our own geopolitics, it is worth describing how Mackinder reached his conclusion. For his article, taking in the whole of history and human settlement patterns, is the archetype of the geographical discipline, recalling the work of Herodotus and Ibn Khaldun, and presaging stylistically the work of McNeill, Hodgson, and the French historian and geographer Fernand Braudel. As Mackinder writes, in the manner of Braudel, “Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls.”8

  Mackinder’s opening sentence suggests the epic sweep of his article:

  When historians in the remote future come to look back on the group of centuries through which we are now passing, and see them fore-shortened, as we to-day see the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that they will describe the last 400 years as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year 1900.9

  He explains that whereas medieval Christendom was “pent into a narrow region and threatened by external barbarism,” the Columbian age—the Age of Discovery—saw Europe expand across the oceans into other continents against “negligible resistances.” But from the present time forth, in the post-Columbian age (he writes from the vantage point of 1904), “we shall again have to deal with a closed political system,” and this time one of “world-wide scope.” Elaborating, he says:

  Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will [henceforth] be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.10

  By perceiving that there was no more room on the planet for European empires to expand, he also understood that European wars would have to be played out on a worldwide scale, something which would come true in World Wars I and II. Yet, as I learned years ago at a seminar at the United States Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, attrition of the same adds up to big change. In other words, while the Age of Discovery had more or less ended by 1900, throughout the twentieth century and up through the present day—and especially looking forward to the coming decades—that closed and crowded map or chessboard of Mackinder’s, as I’ve already indicated, has filled up even more: not just in terms of population, but in terms of the range of weaponry. The Middle East, for example, in the last fifty years alone has gone from a rural society to one of immense megacities. The world, as I’ve learned as a foreign correspondent for the past thirty years, is even in some of its remotest parts heavily urbanized. We will later revisit in depth all the implications of this newly crowded map, but to do that we must first return to Mackinder and his Eurasia pivot theory.

  Mackinder asks us to look at European history as “subordinate” to that of Asia, for he believes that European civilization is merely the outcome of the struggle against Asiatic invasion. Ahead of McNeill by decades, Mackinder points out that Europe became the cultural phenomenon that it is mainly because of its geography: an intricate array of mountains, valleys, and peninsulas—from which individual nations would emerge—set against the immense and threatening flatland of Russia to the east. That Russian flatland was divided between forest to the north and steppe to the south. The earliest incarnations of Poland and Russia were established, as Mackinder explains, wholly in the protective embraces of the northern forest; for out of the naked southern steppe from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries came a succession of nomadic invaders: Huns, Avers, Bulgarians, Magyars, Kalmuks, Cummins, Patzinaks, Mongols, and others. For on the Heartland steppe the land is unceasingly flat, the climate hard, and the vegetable production limited to grass, in turn destroyed by sand, driven by powerful winds. Such conditions bred hard and cruel races of men who had at once to destroy any adversaries they came across or be destroyed themselves, as there was no better means of defense in
one spot than in another. It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France. Likewise, Venice, the Papacy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other burgeoning European powers would all originate, or at least mature, through their threatening encounter with Asiatic steppe nomads. As Mackinder writes:

  When we reflect that through several centuries of the Dark Ages the Norse pagans in their ships were at piracy on the Northern seas, and the Saracen and Moorish infidels in their ships at piracy on the Mediterranean, and that the horse-riding Turks from Asia raided thus into the very heart of the Christian peninsula when it was clasped by hostile sea-power, we have some idea of the pounding, as between pestle and mortar, which went into the making of modern Europe. The pestle was landpower from the Heartland.11

  Meanwhile, Russia, protected by forest glades against many a rampaging host, nevertheless fell prey in the thirteenth century to the Golden Horde of the Mongols. Thus would Russia be denied access to the European Renaissance, and branded forever with the bitterest feelings of inferiority and insecurity. The ultimate land-based empire, with no natural barriers against invasion save for the forest itself, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally conquered, and as a result would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory, or at least dominating its contiguous shadow zones.

  Whereas the Mongol invasions out of Central Asia decimated and subsequently changed not only Russia, but Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the northern reaches of the Arab Middle East, Europe in many parts knew no such level of destruction, and thus was able to emerge as the political cockpit of the world.12 Indeed, given that the Sahara Desert blocked Europe off from almost all of Africa, the macro-destiny of medieval Europe up until the Columbian epoch, according to Mackinder, was to be generally conditioned by what happened on the Asian steppe. And it wasn’t only the Mongols that we are talking about; the Seljuk Turks, bursting out of the heartland steppe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, overran much of the Middle East, and it was their ill treatment of Christian pilgrims at Jerusalem that ostensibly led to the Crusades, which Mackinder considers the beginning of Europe’s collective modern history.