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

  The concept of strengthening the U.S. air and sea presence on Oceania reflects a compromise between resisting Greater China at all costs and acceding somewhat to a future Chinese navy role in policing the First Island Chain, while at the same time making China pay a steep price for military aggression on Taiwan. Without ever saying so, this vision allows one to contemplate a world in which American “legacy” bases would be scaled back somewhat on the First Island Chain, even as American ships and planes continue to patrol it, in and out of China’s anti-access bubble. Meanwhile, the plan envisages a dramatic expansion of American naval activity in the Indian Ocean. To achieve this, the United States would not have hardened bases, but rather austere “operating locations” and defense agreements in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia; and on island nations scattered about the Indian Ocean, such as the Comoros, Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, Maldives, and Andamans, a number of which are managed directly or indirectly by France and India, both U.S. allies. This sustains the freedom of navigation in Eurasia along with unimpeded energy flows. The plan deemphasizes existing American bases in Japan and South Korea, and diversifies the U.S. footprint around Oceania to replace the overwhelming stress on Guam, thus moving away from easily targeted “master” bases. For in an age of prickly sovereignty, defended by volatile mass medias, hardening foreign bases make them politically indigestible to local populations. Guam, as a U.S. territory, is the exception that proves the rule. The United States experienced such difficulty with the use of its bases in Turkey prior to the Iraq War in 2003, and for a short time with the use of bases in Japan in 2010. The American Army presence in South Korea is now less embattled mainly because the number of troops stationed there has dropped from 38,000 to 25,000 in recent years, while downtown Seoul has largely been abandoned by the U.S. military.

  In any case, the American hold on the First Island Chain is beginning to be pried loose. Local populations are less agreeable to foreign bases, even as a rising China serves as both an intimidator and attractor that can complicate America’s bilateral relations with its Pacific allies. It is about time that this is happening. To wit, the 2009–2010 crisis in American-Japanese relations, with an inexperienced new Japanese government wanting to rewrite the rules of the bilateral relationship in Tokyo’s favor, even as it talked of developing deeper ties with China, should have occurred years before. The paramount American position in the Pacific is an outdated legacy of World War II, which left China, Japan, and the Philippines devastated: nor can the division of Korea, a product of fighting that ended six decades ago, and left the U.S. military with a dominant position on the peninsula, last forever.

  Meanwhile, a Greater China is emerging politically and economically in Central-East Asia and in the Western Pacific, with a significant naval dimension in the East and South China seas, while at the same time Beijing is involved in port-building projects and arms transfers on the Indian Ocean littoral. Only substantial political and economic turmoil inside China could alter this trend. But just outside the borders of this new power realm will likely be a stream of American warships, perhaps headquartered in many cases in Oceania, and partnered with warships from India, Japan, and other democracies, all of whom cannot resist the Chinese embrace, but at the same time are forced to balance against it. Given time, a Chinese blue-water force could become less territorial as it grows in confidence, and thus be drawn into this very alliance structure. Moreover, as political scientist Robert S. Ross points out in a 1999 article that is as relevant now as it was then, because of the particular geography of East Asia, the struggle between China and the United States will remain more stable than that between the Soviet Union and the United States. That is because American maritime power during the Cold War was not enough to contain the Soviet Union; a significant land force in Europe was also required. But even given a faintly pro-Chinese Greater Korea, no such land force will ever be required around the Rimland of Eurasia, in which the U.S. Navy will be pitted against a weaker Chinese one.59 (The size of the U.S. land force in Japan is diminishing, and is in any case directed not at China, but at North Korea.)

  Still, the very fact of Chinese economic power—increasingly accompanied by military power—will lead to a pivotal degree of tension in the years ahead. To paraphrase Mearsheimer’s argument from The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, the United States, as the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, will seek to prevent China from becoming the regional hegemon over much of the Eastern Hemisphere.60 This could be the signal drama of the age. Mackinder and Spykman would not be surprised.

  Chapter XII

  INDIA’S GEOGRAPHICAL DILEMMA

  As the United States and China become great power rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the twenty-first century. India, in other words, looms as the ultimate pivot state. It is, according to Spykman, a Rimland power writ large. Mahan noted that India, located in the center of the Indian Ocean littoral, is critical for the seaward penetration of both the Middle East and China. But even as the Indian political class understands at a very intimate level America’s own historical and geographical situation, the American political class has no such understanding of India’s. Yet if Americans do not come to grasp India’s highly unstable geopolitics, especially as it concerns Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China, they will badly mishandle the relationship. India’s history and geography since early antiquity constitute the genetic code for how the world looks from New Delhi. I begin by placing the Indian Subcontinent in the context of Eurasia in general.

  With Russia dominating the landmass of Eurasia, even as it is sparsely populated, the four great centers of population on the super-continent are on its peripheries: Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and China. Chinese and European civilizations, as the geographer James Fairgrieve wrote in 1917, grew outward in organic fashion from the nurseries of the Wei River valley and the Mediterranean.1 Southeast Asia’s civilizational development was more elaborate: with Pyu and Mon peoples, followed by Burmans, Khmers, Siamese, Vietnamese, Malays, and others—in turn, influenced by southward migrations from China—coagulating along river valleys like the Irrawaddy and Mekong, as well as on islands like Java and Sumatra. India is another case entirely. Like China, India is possessed of geographical logic, framed as it is by the Arabian Sea to the west and southwest, by the Bay of Bengal to the east and southeast, by the mountainous Burmese jungles to the east, and by the Himalayas and the knot of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush to the north and northwest. India, also like China, is internally vast. But to a lesser extent than China, India lacks a singular nursery of demographic organization like the Wei valley and lower Yellow River, from which a polity could expand outward in all directions.

  Even the Ganges River valley did not provide enough of a platform for the expansion of a unitary Indian state unto the subcontinent’s deep, peninsular south: for the subcontinent’s various river systems besides the Ganges—Brahmaputra, Narmada, Tungabhadra, Kaveri, Godavari, and so on—further divide it. The Kaveri Delta, for example, is the core of Dravidian life, much as the Ganges is of that of the Hindi-speaking peoples.2 Moreover, India has (along with Southeast Asia) the hottest climate and most abundant and luxuriant landscape of all the Eurasian population hubs, and therefore its inhabitants, Fairgrieve tells us, lacked the need to build political structures for the organization of resources, at least on the scale that the temperate zone Chinese and Europeans did. This last point, of course, may seem overly deterministic, and perhaps inherently racist in its stark simplicity: a feature common to the era in which Fairgrieve wrote. Yet as in the case of Mackinder, who worried about the “yellow peril” that China supposedly represented, Fairgrieve’s larger analysis of India is essentially valid, as well as insightful.

  For while obviously constituting its own unique civilization, the Indian Subcontinent, because of the above reasons, has through much of its history lacked the political unity of China, even as it has been open to concentrated invasion
s from its northwest, the least defined and protected of its frontier regions, where India is dangerously close to both the Central Asian steppe and the Persian-Afghan plateau, with their more “virile,” temperate zone civilizations.3 Motivating these invasions throughout history has been the welcoming fecundity, reinforced by not too excessive rainfall, that characterizes the plain of the Punjab, watered as it is by the Indus River and its tributaries at exactly the point where the Persian-Afghan plateau drops to the floor of the subcontinent. Indeed, it is the thundering invasions and infiltrations from West and Central Asia that have disrupted the quest for unity and stability in the subcontinent well into the modern era. As Mackinder said in one of his lectures: “In the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which warlike preparation must ever be ready. It is the Northwest Frontier of India.”4

  India’s advantages and disadvantages as it seeks great power status in the early twenty-first century inhere still in this geography. As the late historian Burton Stein notes, a map of India through the medieval era would have extended into parts of Central Asia and Iran, while at the same time showing only a tenuous link between the Indus valley in the northwest and peninsular India south of the Ganges.5 For just as today’s China represents a triumphant culmination of the relationship between the Inner Asian steppe-land and the floodplains of the Chinese heartland, India was for millennia heavily influenced by its higher-altitude shadow zones, which, unlike in the case of China, it has yet to dominate, so that India remains the lesser power.

  The ties between subcontinental India and southeastern Afghanistan are obvious because of their contiguity, yet those between India and the Central Asian steppe-land and between India and the Iranian plateau are equally profound. India and Iran have shared the predicament of being on the receiving end of Mongol onslaughts from Central Asia, even as the dynamism of Iranian culture, abetted by invasions since the time of the Achaemenids (sixth to fourth centuries B.C.), led to Persian being the official language of India until 1835.6 For India’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal emperors “became the embodiment of Persian culture,” notes the late historian K. M. Panikkar, “and celebrated Nauroz [Persian New Year] with traditional festivities and popularized Persian techniques in art.”7 Meanwhile, Urdu, the official language of Pakistan—the state occupying the Indian Subcontinent’s northwestern quadrant—draws heavily on Persian (as well as Arabic) and is written in a modified Arabic script.8 India, thus, is both a subcontinent and a vital extremity of the Greater Middle East. Here is where we can really understand William McNeill’s point about the mixing and melding of civilizations.

  And so the key to understanding India is the realization that while as a subcontinent India makes eminent geographical sense, its natural boundaries are, nevertheless, quite weak in places. The result has been various states throughout history that do not conform to our spatial idea of India, and in fact lie astride it. In fact, the present Indian state still does not conform to the borders of the subcontinent, and that is the heart of its dilemma: for Pakistan, Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent Nepal also lie within the subcontinent, and pose significant security threats to India, robbing India of vital political energy that it would otherwise harness for power projection throughout much of Eurasia.

  It is not that human settlement from early antiquity forward doesn’t adhere to subcontinental geography; rather, it is that India’s geography is itself subtle, particularly in the northwest, telling a different story than the map reveals at first glance. At first glance, the relief map shows a brown layer of mountains and tableland neatly marking off the cool wastes of middle Asia from the green tropical floor of the subcontinent along the present border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the descent from Afghanistan to the Indus River, which runs lengthwise through the middle of Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, so that for millennia similar cultures occupied both the high plateaus and the lowland, riverine plains, whether Harappan, Kushan, Turkic, Mughal, Indo-Persian, Indo-Islamic, or Pushtun, to name but a few. And this is to say nothing of the alkaline deserts of Makran and Baluchistan that unite Iran with the subcontinent; or the medieval sea traffic that united Arabia with India by virtue of the predictable monsoon winds. “The frontier of Al-Hind,” as South Asia scholar André Wink—echoing an Arab term—calls the whole region from eastern Iran to western India, dominated by Persianized Muslim populations, has throughout history been very much a fluid cultural organism, so that defining state borders is inherently problematic.9

  The map of Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftaincies in the late fourth to mid-second millennia B.C., is telling. According to the archaeological remains, the two major cities were Moenjodaro and Harappa, both alongside the Indus in upper Sindh; so that the Indus, rather than a border differentiating the subcontinent from Inner Asia, constituted the heart of a civilization in its own right. The outlines of the Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and then southeast down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, skirting the Thar Desert: that is, it nearly touched present-day Iran and Afghanistan, covered much of Pakistan, and extended into both northwestern and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to landscapes capable of supporting irrigation, even as it suggested how a vast subcontinent had many natural subdivisions within it.

  Aryans may have infiltrated from the Iranian plateau, and together with the subcontinent’s autochthonous inhabitants were part of a process that consolidated the political organization of the Gangetic plain in northern India around 1000 B.C. This led to sets of monarchies between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C., culminating with the Nanda Empire, which in the fourth century B.C. stretched across northern India and the Gangetic plain from the Punjab to Bengal. In 321 B.C., Chandragupta Maurya dethroned Dhana Nanda and founded the Mauryan Empire, which came to envelop much of the subcontinent, except for the deep south, and thus for the first time in history encouraged the idea of India as a political entity conforming with the geography of South Asia. Burton Stein suggests that the merging of so many city-states and chieftaincies into a single coherent system was, in addition to the “vigorous commerce” between them, partially inspired by the threat posed by Alexander the Great, who was on the verge of conquering the Ganges River valley were it not for a mutiny of his soldiers in 326 B.C. Another factor aiding unity was the emergence of the new, pan-subcontinental ideologies of Buddhism and Jainism that “captured the loyalty of commercial peoples,” as Stein writes.10

  The Mauryan kings embraced Buddhism, and ran their empire on Greek and Roman imperial practices that had seeped across the spinal route of migration in the temperate zone from the Aegean basin and West Asia into India. Nevertheless, it required all manners of human ingenuity to hold the Mauryan Empire together. Chandragupta’s advisor might have been one Kautilya, who penned a political classic, the Arthashastra, or “Book of the State,” which shows how a conqueror can create an empire by exploiting the relationships between various city-states: any city-state that touches one’s own should be considered an enemy, because it will have to be subdued in the course of empire building; but a distant city-state that borders an enemy should be considered a friend. Because holding such an immense subcontinental empire together was difficult, Kautilya believed in complex alliance networks, and in benevolence toward the conquered, whose way of life should be preserved.11 The Mauryan was a decentralized empire, to say the least, with a heartland in the eastern Gangetic plain and four regional centers by the time of Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka: Taxila in the northwest, outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad; Ujjain on the Malwa plateau in western-central India; Suvarnagiri in the southern Indian state of Karnataka; and Kalinga along the Bay of Bengal south of Kolkata.

  It was an extraordinary achievement this early in history, with only primitive means of transport and communications available, for one empire to cover so much of the subcontinent. The Mauryans demonstrated the potential for a single
state to employ geographic logic over a vast area for quite some time. Alas, the decline of the Mauryans led to the familiar invasions from the northwest, notably through the Khyber Pass: Greeks in the second century B.C. and Scythians in the first century B.C. This encouraged the redivision of the subcontinent into regional dynasties: Sunga, Pandyan, Kuninda, and so on. The Kushan Empire emerged in the first century A.D. in Bactria, where northern Afghanistan meets Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and its Indo-European rulers conquered territory from the Ferghana valley in the demographic heart of Central Asia to Bihar in northeastern India. The very map of the Kushana domain is mind-boggling to our modern sensibilities, overlapping as it does former Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and much of northern India’s Gangetic plain. The Kushan Empire follows river valleys on one hand, but crosses mountain ranges on the other, so that it both follows and contradicts geography. It also constitutes a signal lesson in the fact that current borders may not necessarily indicate the last word in political organization of Central and South Asia.