Preface. Jared Diamond’s famous book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” discussed why some nations were so much more successful than others. Much success came from nearby nations who bootstrapped each other up with new ideas, crops, and ideas. Especially Eurasia due to how easy it was to travel across this vast area.
This is a book review of Marshall’s “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.” It goes into more detail about the geography of nations and regions and how that affected their ability to defend or conquer other nations, resources, and their people.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Marshall T (2015) Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.
Mitrovica was also where the advancing NATO ground forces came to a halt. During the three-month war, there had been veiled threats that NATO intended to invade all of Serbia. In truth, the restraints of both geography and politics meant the NATO leaders never really had that option. Hungary had made it clear that it would not allow an invasion from its territory, as it feared reprisals against the 350,000 ethnic Hungarians in northern Serbia. The alternative was an invasion from the south, which would have gotten them to the Ibar in double-quick time; but NATO would then have faced the mountains above them.
An understanding of how crucial the physical landscape was in reporting news in the Balkans stood me in good stead in the years that followed. For example, in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, I saw a demonstration of how, even with today’s modern technology, climate still dictates the military possibilities of even the world’s most powerful armies. I was in northern Afghanistan, having crossed the border river from Tajikistan on a raft, in order to link up with the Northern Alliance (NA) troops who were fighting the Taliban. The American fighter jets and bombers were already overhead, pounding Taliban and al-Qaeda positions on the cold, dusty plains and hills east of Mazar-e-Sharif in order to pave the way for the advance on Kabul.
The most intense sandstorm I have ever experienced blew in, turning everything a mustard-yellow color. At the height of the storm you couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead of you, and the only thing clear was that the Americans’ satellite technology, at the cutting edge of science, was helpless,
Everyone, from President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the NA troops on the ground, just had to wait. Then it rained and the sand that had settled on everything turned into mud. The rain came down so hard that the baked-mud huts we were living in looked as if they were melting. Again it was clear that the move south was on hold until geography finished having its say.
More recently, in 2012, I was given another lesson in geostrategy: As Syria descended into full-blown civil war, I was standing on a Syrian hilltop overlooking a valley south of the city of Hama and saw a hamlet burning in the distance. Syrian friends pointed out a much larger village about a mile away, from where they said the attack had come. They then explained that if one side could push enough people from the other faction out of the valley, then the valley could be joined onto other land that led to the country’s only motorway, and as such would be useful in carving out a piece of contiguous, viable territory that one day could be used to create a mini-statelet if Syria could not be put back together again. Where before I saw only a burning hamlet, I could now see its strategic importance and understand how political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities.
In Russia we see the influence of the Arctic, and how it limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power. In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy and how in 2016 it became obvious the speed at which China is seeking to change this. The chapter on the United States illustrates how shrewd decisions to expand its territory in key regions allowed it to achieve its modern destiny as a two-ocean superpower. Europe shows us the value of flatland and navigable rivers in connecting regions and producing a culture able to kick-start the modern world, while Africa is a prime example of the effects of isolation.
The colonial powers used ink to draw lines that bore no relation to the physical realities of the region, and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. In the Middle East, an attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.
RUSSIA
What are those rules? The place to begin is in the land where power is hard to defend, and so for centuries its leaders have compensated by pushing outward. It is the land without mountains to its west: Russia.
Immense. It is 6,000,000 square miles vast, 11 time zones vast; it is the largest country in the world. Its forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppe, taiga, and mountains are all vast.
This vast North European Plain stretches from France to the Urals (which extend a thousand miles south to north, forming a natural boundary between Europe and Asia) is only 300 miles wide. It runs from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. The North European Plain encompasses all of western and northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and nearly all of Poland. From a Russian perspective this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing toward Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden;
By the time you get to Russia’s borders it is more than 2,000 miles wide, and is flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941.
Likewise, in the Russian Far East it is geography that protects Russia. It is difficult to move an army from Asia up into Asian Russia; there’s not much to attack except for snow and you could get only as far as the Urals. You would then end up holding a massive piece of territory, in difficult conditions, with long supply lines and the ever-present risk of a counterattack.
You might think that no one is intent on invading Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past 500 years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans—twice, in both world wars, once every 33 years.
Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; and Albania in 2009. NATO says no such assurances were given.
Russia as a concept dates back to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus, which was based in Kiev and other towns along the Dnieper River, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols, expanding their empire, continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the thirteenth century. The fledgling Russia then relocated northeast in and around the city of Moscow.
Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defense—i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outward. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history. Without his character, of both utter ruthlessness and vision, Russian history would be different.
A military base was built in Chechnya to deter any would-be attacker, be they the Mongol Golden Horde, the Ottoman Empire, or the Persians. There were setbacks, but over the next century Russia would push past the Urals and edge into Siberia, eventually incorporating all the land to the Pacific coast far to the east.
Now the Russians had a partial buffer zone and a hinterland—strategic depth—somewhere to fall back to in the case of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor fight their way over the Urals to get to them. Their land was becoming what we now know as Russia, and to get to it from the south or southeast you had to have a huge army and a very long supply line
In the eighteenth century, Russia, under Peter the Great—who founded the Russian Empire in 1721—and then Empress Catherine the Great, looked westward, expanding the empire to become one of the great powers of Europe, driven chiefly by trade and nationalism. A more secure and powerful Russia was now able to occupy Ukraine and reach the Carpathian Mountains. It took over most of what we now know as the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Thus it was protected from any incursion via land that way, or from the Baltic Sea.
How big is the biggest country in the world? Russia is twice the size of the United States or China, five times the size of India, seventy times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population (144 million). Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones that Moscow governs.
Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there. It is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China.
When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow, which results in an aggressive security system similar to the one in Soviet days. During that era, Russia was effectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation—for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus—still feel this way.
Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean,” in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.
No wonder the forged will of Peter the Great advises his descendants to “approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India.
the “stans,” such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin so as to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states.
In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is
Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states that suffered most under Soviet tyranny.
Why would the Russians want Moldova? Because as the Carpathian Mountains curve around southwest to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the southeast is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also be thought of as a flat corridor into Russia, and just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea—also known as Moldova—in the region formerly known as Bessarabia.
Across the Black Sea from Moldova lies another wine-producing nation: Georgia. It is not high on Russia’s list of places to control for two reasons. First, the Georgia–Russian war of 2008 left large parts of the country occupied by Russian troops, who now fully control the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Second, it lies south of the Caucasus Mountains and Russia also has troops stationed in neighboring Armenia. Moscow would prefer an extra layer to their buffer zone, but can live without taking the rest of Georgia.
Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; and Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent.
The days when Russia was considered a military threat to China have passed and the idea of Russian troops occupying Manchuria, as they did in 1945, is inconceivable, although they do keep a wary eye on each other in places in which each would like to be the dominant power, such as Kazakhstan. However, they are not in competition for the ideological leadership of global Communism and this has freed each side to cooperate at a military level where their interests coincide. What seems like an odd example came in May 2015 when they conducted joint military live fire exercises in the Mediterranean. Beijing’s push into a sea 9,000 miles from home was part of its attempt to extend its naval reach around the globe. Moscow has designs on the gas fields found in the Mediterranean, is courting Greece, and wants to protect its small naval port on the Syrian coast. In addition, both sides are quite happy to annoy the NATO powers in the region, including the American 6th Fleet based in Naples.
From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat. Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day.
CHINA
Until now China has never been a naval power—with its large landmass, multiple borders, and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive. Its merchants have long sailed the oceans to trade goods, but its navy did not seek territory beyond its region, and the difficulty of patrolling the great sea-lanes of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans was not worth the effort. It was always a land power, with a lot of land and a lot of people—now nearly 1.4 billion.
The heartland, as the North China Plain is known, was and is a large, fertile plain with two main rivers and a climate that allows rice and soybeans to be harvested twice a season (double-cropping), which encouraged rapid population growth.
The Han now make up more than 90 percent of China’s population and they dominate Chinese politics and business. They are differentiated by Mandarin, Cantonese, and many other regional languages, but united by ethnicity and at a political level by the geopolitical impulsion to protect the heartland. The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and—crucially—the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States,
China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that—if the Han could reach them and establish control—would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago.
Between 605 and 609 CE, the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world’s longest man-made waterway, was extended and finally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze.
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It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved—but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding.
In the eighteenth century, China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the northwest was conquered, becoming the country’s biggest province. An area of rugged mountains and vast desert basins, Xinjiang is 642,820 square miles. But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han, the buffer was worth the trouble,
Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course, the border is really the Tibetan-Indian border—and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.” China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.
Southeast of this Kazakh border is the restive “semiautonomous” Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish. Xinjiang borders eight countries: Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
There was, is, and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of “East Turkestan,” in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbors in the stans becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China.
Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites.
The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of “One Belt, One Road.” A land-based route based on the old Silk Route that goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southward to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar in Pakistan.
Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 percent Han, at a conservative estimate. Uighur separatists lack a Dalai Lama–type figure upon whom foreign media can fix, and their cause is almost unknown around the world. China tries to keep it that way.
China will not cede this territory and, as in Tibet, the window for independence is closing. Both are buffer zones, one is a major land trade route, and—crucially—both offer markets (albeit with a limited income) for an economy that must keep producing and selling goods if China is to continue to grow and to prevent mass unemployment. Failure to do so would likely lead to widespread civil disorder, threatening the control of the Communist Party and the unity of China.
The deal between the party leaders and the people has been, for a generation now, “We’ll make you better off—you will follow our orders.” So long as the economy keeps growing, that grand bargain may last. If it stops, or goes into reverse, the deal is off. The current level of demonstrations and anger against corruption and inefficiency are testament to what would happen if the deal breaks.
Another growing problem for the party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40% of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture.
China is now building a blue-water navy. A green-water navy patrols its maritime borders, a blue-water navy patrols the oceans. It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen—the US Navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals in the seas. Gradually the Chinese will put more and more vessels into the seas off their coast and into the Pacific. Each time one is launched there will be less space for the Americans in the China seas. The Americans know this, and know the Chinese are working toward a land-based antiship missile system to double the reasons why the US Navy, or any of its allies, might one day want to think hard about sailing through the South China Sea.
China wants to control the passageways through the chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime it could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.
China also intends to become a two-ocean power (Pacific and Indian). To achieve this, China is investing in deep-water ports in Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—an investment that buys it good relations, the potential for its future navy to have friendly bases to visit or reside in, and trade links back home. The Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal ports are part of an even bigger plan to secure China’s future.
From Burma’s west coastline, China has built natural gas and oil pipelines linking the Bay of Bengal up into southwest China—China’s way of reducing its nervous reliance on the Strait of Malacca, through which almost 80 percent of its energy supplies pass.
A natural disaster or a terrorist/hostage incident involving large numbers of Chinese workers would require China to take action, and that entails forward bases, or at least agreements from states that China could pass through their territory. There are now tens of millions of Chinese around the world, in some cases housed in huge complexes for workers in parts of Africa. A great depression such as in the 1930s could set it back decades. China has locked itself into the global economy. If we don’t buy, they don’t make. If there is mass and long-term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be—like everything else in modern China—on a scale hitherto unseen.
NORTH AMERICA
To the north, above the Great Lakes, lies the Canadian Shield, the world’s largest area of Precambrian rock, much of which forms a barrier to human settlement. Geography had determined that if a political entity could get to and then control the land “from sea to shining sea,” it would be a great power, the greatest history has known. Once that power was achieved, the Union would become militarily impossible to invade.
The climate, fed by the Gulf Stream, blessed the region with the right amount of rainfall to cultivate crops on a large scale, and the right type of soil for them to flourish in. This allowed for population growth in an area in which, for most, work was possible year-round, even in the height of summer. Winter actually adds a bonus, with temperatures warm enough to work in but cold enough to kill off many of the germs, which to this day plague huge parts of the rest of the world.
The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else are there so many rivers whose source is not in highland and whose waters run smoothly all the way to the ocean across vast distances. The Mississippi, fed by much of the basin river system, begins near Minneapolis and ends 1,800 miles south in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mexico is not blessed in the American way. It has poor-quality agricultural land, no river system to use for transport.
Concrete for the building of ports, runways, hardened aircraft hangars, fuel depots, dry docks, and Special Forces training areas. In the East, after the defeat of Japan, America seized the opportunity to build these all over the Pacific. Guam, halfway across, they already had; now they had bases right up to the Japanese island of Okinawa in the East China Sea.
There were now only three places from which a challenge to American hegemony could come: a united Europe, Russia, and China. The dream of some Europeans of an EU with “ever closer union” and a common foreign and defense policy is dying slowly before our eyes, and even if it were not, the EU countries spend so little on defense that ultimately they remain reliant on the United States. The complicated aftermath of the Brexit vote has brought confusion to the continent. It also disappointed Washington, DC, which always favored having the UK inside the EU as its eyes and ears
The United States is seeking to demonstrate to the whole region that it is in their best interests to side with Washington—China is doing the opposite. So, when challenged, each side must react, because for each challenge it ducks, its allies’ confidence, and competitors’ fear, slowly drains away until eventually there is an event that persuades a state to switch sides.
The deadly game in this century will be how the Chinese, Americans, and others in the region manage each crisis that arises without losing face and without building up a deep well of resentment and anger on both sides.
ASIA
While all the other countries in the region matter, in what is a complicated diplomatic jigsaw puzzle, the key states look to be Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. These three sit astride the narrow Strait of Malacca. Every day through that strait come 12 million barrels of oil heading for an increasingly thirsty China and elsewhere in the region. As long as these three countries are pro-American, the Americans have a key advantage.
On the plus side, the Chinese are not politically ideological, they do not seek to spread Communism, nor do they covet (much) more territory in the way the Russians did during the Cold War, and neither side is looking for conflict. The Chinese can accept America guarding most of the sea-lanes that deliver Chinese goods to the world,
As China’s thirst for foreign oil and gas grows, that of the United States declines. This will have a huge impact on its foreign relations, especially in the Middle East, with ramifications for other countries. Due to offshore drilling in US coastal waters, and underground fracking across huge regions of the country, America looks destined to become not just self-sufficient in energy, but a net exporter of energy by 2020. This will mean that its focus on ensuring a flow of oil and gas from the Gulf region will diminish. It will still have strategic interests there, but the focus will no longer be so intense.
The policy in Latin America will be to ensure that the Panama Canal remains open,
In Africa, the Americans are but one nation seeking the continent’s natural wealth, but the nation finding most of it is China.
EUROPE
Western Europe has no real deserts, the frozen wastes are confined to a few areas in the far north, and earthquakes, volcanoes, and massive flooding are rare. The rivers are long, flat, navigable, and made for trade. As they empty into a variety of seas and oceans, they flow into coastlines that are—west, north, and south—abundant in natural harbors. These are the factors that led to the Europeans creating the first industrialized nation states, which in turn led them to be the first to conduct industrial-scale war.
Europe’s major rivers do not meet (unless you count the Sava, which drains into the Danube in Belgrade). This partly explains why there are so many countries in what is a relatively small space. Because they do not connect, most of the rivers act, at some point, as boundaries, and each is a sphere of economic influence in its own right; this gave rise to at least one major urban development on the banks of each river, some of which in turn became capital cities.
Europe’s second longest river, the Danube (1,771 miles), is a case in point. It rises in Germany’s Black Forest and flows south on its way to the Black Sea. In all, the Danube basin affects eighteen countries and forms natural borders along the way, including those of Slovakia and Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, Serbia and Romania, and Romania and Bulgaria. More than two thousand years ago it was one of the borders of the Roman Empire, gave rise to the present capital cities of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade.
The contrast between northern and southern Europe is also at least partly attributable to the fact that the south has fewer coastal plains suitable for agriculture, and has suffered more from drought and natural disasters than the north,
Of all the countries in the plain, France was best situated to take advantage of it. France is the only European country to be both a northern and southern power. It contains the largest expanse of fertile land in Western Europe, and many of its rivers connect with one another; one flows west all the way to the Atlantic (the Seine), another south to the Mediterranean (the Rhône). These factors, together with France’s relative flatness, were suitable for the unification of regions, and—especially from the time of Napoleon—centralization of power.
Spain is also struggling, and has always struggled because of its geography. Its narrow coastal plains have poor soil, and access to markets is hindered internally by its short rivers and the Meseta Central, a highland plateau surrounded by mountain ranges, some of which cut through it. Trade with Western Europe is further hampered by the Pyrenees, and any markets to its south on the other side of the Mediterranean are in developing countries with limited income.
Greece suffers similarly. Much of the Greek coastline comprises steep cliffs and there are few coastal plains for agriculture. Inland are more steep cliffs, rivers that will not allow transportation, and few wide, fertile valleys. What agricultural land there is is of high quality; the problem is that there is too little of it to allow Greece to become a major agricultural exporter, or to develop more than a handful of major urban areas containing highly educated, highly skilled, and technologically advanced populations. Its situation is further exacerbated by its location, with Athens positioned at the tip of a peninsula, almost cut off from land trade with Europe.
It is reliant on the Aegean Sea for access to maritime trade in the region—but across that sea lies Turkey, a large potential enemy. Greece fought several wars against Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
The mainland is protected by mountains, but there are about 1,400 Greek islands (six thousand if you include various rocks sticking out of the Aegean) of which approximately two hundred are inhabited. It takes a decent navy just to patrol this territory, never mind one strong enough to deter any attempt to take the islands over. The result is a huge cost in military spending that Greece cannot afford.
Cracks are appearing in the edifice of the “family of Europe.” On the periphery of Western Europe the financial crisis has left Greece looking like a semidetached member; to the east it has again seen conflict. If the aberration of the past seventy years of peace is to continue through this century, that peace will need love, care, and attention.
The post–Second World War generations have grown up with peace as the norm, but what is different about the current generation is that Europeans find it difficult to imagine the opposite. Wars now seem to be what happens elsewhere or in the past—at worst, they happen on the “periphery” of Europe. The trauma of two world wars, followed by seven decades of peace and then the collapse of the Soviet Union persuaded many people that Western Europe was a “post-conflict” region.
history and geographical shape-shifting haunts Polish foreign policy even if the country is currently at peace, successful, and one of the bigger EU states, with a population of 38 million. It is also physically one of the larger members and its economy has doubled since it emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, but still it looks to the past as it tries to secure its future.
The corridor of the North European Plain is at its narrowest between Poland’s Baltic coast in the north and the beginning of the Carpathian Mountains in the south. This is where, from a Russian military perspective, the best defensive line could be placed or, from an attacker’s viewpoint, the place at which its forces would be squeezed together before breaking out toward Russia. The Poles have seen it both ways, as armies have swept east and west across it, frequently changing borders.
If you take The Times Atlas of European History and flick through the pages quickly as if it were a flip book, you see Poland emerge circa 1000 CE, then continually change shape, disappear, and reappear until assuming its present form in the late twentieth century.
The location of Germany and Russia, coupled with the Poles’ experience of these two countries, does not make either a natural ally for Warsaw. Like France, Poland wants to keep Germany locked inside the EU and NATO, while not-so-ancient fears of Russia have come to the fore with the crisis in Ukraine. Over the centuries, Poland has seen the Russian tide ebb and flow from and to them.
The Balkan countries are also once again free of empire. Their mountainous terrain led to the emergence of so many small states in the region, and is one of the things that has kept them from integrating—despite the best efforts of the experiment of the Union of Southern Slavs, otherwise known as Yugoslavia.
With the wars of the 1990s behind them, most of the former Yugoslav countries are looking westward, but in Serbia, the pull of the east, with its Orthodox religion and Slavic peoples, remains strong. Russia, which has yet to forgive the Western nations for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the separation of Kosovo, is still attempting to coax Serbia into its orbit via the gravitational pull of language, ethnicity, religion, and energy deals.
Germany had always had a bigger geographical problem than France. The flatlands of the North European Plain gave it two reasons to be fearful: to the west the Germans saw their long-unified and powerful neighbor France, and to the east the giant Russian Bear. Their ultimate fear was of a simultaneous attack by both powers across the flatland of the corridor. France feared Germany, Germany feared France, and when France joined both Russia and Britain in the Triple Entente of 1907, Germany feared all three. There was now also the added dimension that the British navy could, at a time of its choosing, blockade German access to the North Sea and the Atlantic. Germany’s solution, twice, was to attack France first. The dilemma of Germany’s geographical position and belligerence became known as “the German Question.” The answer, after the horrors of the Second World War, indeed after centuries of war, was the acceptance of the presence in the European lands of a single overwhelming power, the United States, which set up NATO and allowed for the eventual creation of the European Union.
What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world. After the first major financial crisis to hit the Union, that ideology is on an uncertain footing and the ties that bind are fraying. There are signs within the EU of, as Robert Kaplan puts it, “the revenge of geography.” The euro crisis and wider economic problems have revealed the cracks in the House of Europe (notably along the old fault line of the north-south divide). The dream of ever-closer union appears to be frozen, or possibly even in reverse. If it is, then the German question may return. Seen through the prism of seven decades of peace, this may seem alarmist, and Germany is among the most peaceful and democratic members of the European family; but seen through the prism of seven centuries of European warfare, it cannot be ruled out.
We would return to a Europe of sovereign nation states, with each state seeking alliances in a balance of the power system. The Germans would again be fearing encirclement by the Russians and French, the French would again be fearing their bigger neighbor, and we would all be back at the beginning of the twentieth century.
For the French, this is a nightmare. They successfully helped tie Germany down inside the EU, only to find that, after German reunification, they became the junior partner in a twin-engine motor they had hoped to be driving. This poses a problem that Paris does not appear to be able to solve. Unless it quietly accepts that Berlin calls the European shots, it risks further weakening
Both France and Germany are currently working to keep the Union together and are discussing various ways of binding themselves together within the eurozone: they see each other now as natural partners. But only Germany has a plan B—Russia.
The Europeans have begun doing some serious recalculation on their military spending, but there isn’t much money around.
AFRICA
Africa’s coastline? Great beaches—really, really lovely beaches—but terrible natural harbors. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are worthless for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems that helps explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America. It is separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian landmass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.
Africa is three times larger than the United States. You could fit the United States, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany, and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe.
Think of Africa in terms of the top third and bottom two-thirds. The top third begins on the Mediterranean coastlines of the North African Arabic-speaking countries. The coastal plains quickly become the Sahara, the world’s largest dry desert, almost as big as the United States.
Directly below the Sahara is the Sahel region, a semiarid, rock-strewn, sandy strip of land measuring more than three thousand miles at its widest points and stretching from Gambia on the Atlantic coast through Niger, Chad, and right across to Eritrea on the Red Sea. The name Sahel comes from the Arabic sahil, which means “coast,” and is how the people living in the region think of it—as the shoreline of the vast sand sea of the Sahara. It is another sort of shore, one where the influence of Islam diminishes. From the Sahel to the Mediterranean the vast majority of people are Muslims. South of it there is far more diversity in religion.
South of the Sahel, in the bottom two-thirds of Africa, there is more diversity in most things. The land becomes more temperate, and green vegetation appears, which becomes jungle as we approach the Congo and the Central African Republic. Toward the east coast are the great lakes in Uganda and Tanzania, while across to the west more deserts appear in Angola and Namibia. By the time we reach the tip of South Africa the climate is again “Mediterranean,” even though we have traveled almost five thousand miles from the northernmost point in Tunisia on the Mediterranean coast.
Much of the land consists of jungle, swamp, desert, or steep-sided plateau, none of which lend themselves to the growing of wheat or rice, or sustaining herds of sheep. Africa’s rhinos, gazelles, and giraffes stubbornly refused to be beasts of burden—or as Jared Diamond puts it in a memorable passage, “History might have turned out differently if African armies, fed by barnyard-giraffe meat and backed by waves of cavalry mounted on huge rhinos, had swept into Europe to overrun its mutton-fed soldiers mounted on puny horses.”
Something else that to this day holds it back: a virulent set of diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, brought on by the heat and now complicated by crowded living conditions and poor health-care
Europe, which has the Danube and the Rhine, this drawback has hindered contact and trade between regions—which in turn affects economic development and hinders the formation of large trading regions. The continent’s great rivers—the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi, the Nile, and others—don’t connect.
Whereas huge areas of Russia, China, and the United States speak a unifying language, which helps trade, in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size. By the time the outside world arrived in force, most had yet to develop writing, paper, gunpowder, or the wheel.
Unlike Europe or North America, where the jagged coastlines give rise to deep natural harbors, much of the African coastline is smooth.
The DRC should never have been put together; it has fallen apart and is the most underreported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars that have been fought since the late 1990s. The DRC is neither democratic nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of approximately 75 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France, and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world. The people are divided into more than 200 ethnic groups, of which the largest is the Bantu. There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree.
The French comes from the DRC’s years as a Belgian colony (1908–60) and before that when King Leopold of the Belgians used it as his personal property from which to steal its natural resources to line his pockets. Belgian colonial rule made the British and French versions look positively benign and was ruthlessly brutal from start to finish, with few attempts to build any sort of infrastructure to help the inhabitants. In King Leopold’s day the world wanted the region’s rubber for the expanding automobile industry; now China buys more than 50% of the DRC’s exports, but still the population lives in poverty. In 2014, the United Nations’ Human Development Index placed the DRC at number 186 out of 187 countries it measured. The bottom eighteen countries in that list are all in Africa. Because it is so resource-rich and so large, everyone wants a bite out of the DRC, which, as it lacks a substantive central authority, cannot really bite back. The region is also bordered by nine countries. They have all played a role in the DRC’s agony, which is one reason why the Congo wars are also known as “Africa’s world war.”
To the south is Angola, to the north the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic, to the east Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zambia. The roots of the wars go back decades, but the worst of times was triggered by the disaster that hit Rwanda in 1994 and swept westward in its aftermath. After the genocide in Rwanda, the Tutsi survivors and moderate Hutus formed a Tutsi-led government. The killing machines of the Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, fled into eastern DRC but conducted border raids. They also joined with sections of the DRC army to kill the DRC’s Tutsis, who live near the border region. In came the Rwandan and Ugandan armies, backed by Burundi and Eritrea. Allied with opposition militias, they attacked the Interahamwe and overthrew the DRC government. They also went on to control much of the country’s natural wealth, with Rwanda in particular shipping back tons of coltan, which is used in the making of cell phones and computer chips. However, what had been the government forces did not give up and—with the involvement of Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe—continued the fight. The country became a vast battleground with more than twenty factions involved in the fighting.
The wars have killed, at a low estimate, tens of thousands of people and have resulted in the deaths of another six million due to disease and malnutrition. The UN estimates that almost 50% of the victims have been children under the age of five.
The Nile, the longest river in the world (4,160 miles), affects ten countries considered to be in the proximity of its basin—Burundi, the DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Egypt.
A threat to the supply to Egypt’s 700-mile-long, fully navigable section of the Nile is for Cairo a concern—one over which it would be prepared to go to war. Without the Nile, there would be no one there. It may be a huge country, but the vast majority of its 84 million population lives within a few miles of the Nile. Measured by the area in which people dwell, Egypt is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8% of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5% of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about 15 days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the United States, with concurrent costs.
In 2011, Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the dam could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt. As things stand, Egypt has a more powerful military, but that is slowly changing, and Ethiopia, a country of 96 million people, is a growing power. Cairo knows this, and also that, once the dam is built, destroying it would create a flooding catastrophe in both Ethiopia and Sudan. However, at the moment it does not have a casus belli to strike before completion, and despite the fact that a cabinet minister was recently caught on microphone recommending bombing, the next few years are more likely to see intense negotiations, with Egypt wanting cast-iron guarantees that the flow will never be stopped. Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch.
Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producer of oil, and all of this high-quality oil is in the south. Nigerians in the north complain that the profits from that oil are not shared equitably across the country’s regions. This in turn exacerbates the ethnic and religious tensions between the peoples from the Nigerian delta and those in the northeast.
Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system. The onshore oil industry in the delta is also being threatened by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a fancy name for a group that does operate in a region devastated by the oil industry but that uses it as a cover for terrorism and extortion. The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business.
The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north.
sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer—Angola. off the coast in the west lie most of Angola’s oil fields. The rigs out in the Atlantic are owned mostly by American companies, but more than half of the output ends up in China.
China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion railroad project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 percent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda.
Over the southern border, Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects. It has also signed a joint agreement with China and an Omani construction company to overhaul and extend the port of Bagamoyo, as the main port in Dar es Salaam is severely congested. Tanzania looks as if it will be the second-tier power along the east coast. Kenya’s economy is the powerhouse in the five-nation East African Community, accounting for approximately 40% of the region’s GDP. It may have less arable land than Tanzania, but it uses what it has much more efficiently.
China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.
In Luanda, the CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment buildings built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.
Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.
South Africa’s economy is ranked second-largest on the continent, behind Nigeria. It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military, and population (53 million). South Africa is more developed than many African nations, thanks to its location at the very southern tip of the continent with access to two oceans; its natural wealth of gold, silver, and coal; and a climate and land that allow for large-scale food production. Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into highland, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much farther and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity that grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.
MIDDLE EAST
The Greater Middle East extends across 1,000 miles, west to east, from the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains of Iran. From north to south, if we start at the Black Sea and end on the shores of the Arabian Sea off Oman, it is two thousand miles long. The most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France.
Thousands of “drone” missions have been flown as well, some from within the Continental United States. Drones are a clear modern example of technology overcoming some of the restrictions of geography but at the same time serving to underline geography’s importance. The United States houses its growing fleet of drones on at least ten bases around the world. This allows it to hit targets via a joystick operated by a person sitting in an air-conditioned office in Nevada, or transfer control to an operative near the target. But it also means the United States needs to keep good relations with whichever country it receives permission from to house the regional drone HQ.
This is a reminder of the conceptual map of US power required to fully understand geopolitics today. For example, the signal sent from Nevada may need to travel through an underwater cable to Germany and then be sent up to a satellite belonging to a third country that sells bandwidth to the Pentagon.
Iran is a non-Arabic, majority Farsi-speaking giant. It is bigger than France, Germany, and the UK combined, but while the populations of those countries amount to 200 million people, Iran has only 78 million. With limited habitable space, most live in the mountains; the great deserts and salt plains of the interior of Iran are no place for human habitation. Just driving through them can subdue the human spirit. Iran has world’s third-largest reserves. Despite this, Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections, and economic sanctions that have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernizing.
Iran is defended by this geography, with mountains on three sides, swampland and water on the fourth. The Mongols were the last force to make any progress through the territory, in 1219–21, and since then attackers have ground… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
By the time of the Second Gulf War in 2003, even the United States, the greatest fighting force the world has seen, thought better than to take a right turn once it had entered Iraq from the south, knowing that even with its superior firepower, Iran was not a country to invade. In fact, the… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. Khuzestan, for example, is ethnically majority Arab, and elsewhere there are Kurds, Azeri, Turkmen, and Georgians, among others. At most, 60 percent of the country speaks Farsi, the language of the dominant Persian majority. As a result of this diversity, Iran has… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get their own as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
Egypt and Turkey might follow suit. This means that the threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are many restraining factors. One is that, in a straight line, it is one thousand miles from Israel to Iran. The Israeli air force would need to cross two sovereign borders, those of Jordan and Iraq; the latter would certainly tell Iran that the attack was coming. Another is that any other route requires refueling capabilities that may be beyond Israel, and that (if flying the northern route) also overfly sovereign territory. A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card—the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 percent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point, the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west—the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, and it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (28 million Saudis as opposed to 78 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbor if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly.
Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards themselves as the champions of their respective versions of Islam.
Northwest of Iran is a country that is both European and Asian. Turkey lies on the borders of the Arab lands but is not Arabic, and although most of its landmass is part of the wider Middle East region, it tries to distance itself from the conflicts taking place there. The Turks have never been truly recognized as part of Europe by their neighbors to the north and northwest.
Its population is 75 million, and European countries fear that given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labor. What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 percent).
By the late 1980s, however, the continued rejection by Europe and the stubborn refusal of many ordinary Turks to become less religious resulted in a generation of politicians who began to think the unthinkable—that perhaps Turkey needed a plan B. President Turgut Özal, a religious man, came to office in 1989 and began the change. He encouraged Turks to again see Turkey as the great land bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and a country that could again be a great power in all three regions.
The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has similar ambitions, perhaps even greater ones, but has faced similar hurdles in achieving them. These are in part geographical. Politically, the Arab countries remain suspicious that Erdoğan wants to re-create the Ottoman Empire economically and they resist close ties. The Iranians see Turkey as their most powerful military and economic competitor in their own backyard. Worse still are relations between Ankara and Moscow. The Turks and Russians have been at odds for five hundred years
The Syrian civil war has changed that with Russia backing President Assad, and Turkey working hard to help overthrow the Assad regime and replace it with a Sunni Muslim–led government.
In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus takes you only into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Strait to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean. Erdoğan may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.
The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the Green Revolution, describing the young students of north Tehran as the “Youth of Iran,” thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.
The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds, of which average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes. We are aware of our own prejudices, which are legion, but often seem to turn a blind eye to those in the Middle East. The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media. Anti-Semitic cartoons that echo the Nazi Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper are common. Week in, week out, shock-jock imams are given space on prime-time TV shows.
When Hosni Mubarak was ousted as president of Egypt, it was indeed people power that toppled him, but what the outside world failed to see was that the military had been waiting for years for an opportunity to be rid of him and his son Gamal, and that the theater of the street provided the cover they needed. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood called its supporters out that there was enough cover. There were only three institutions in Egypt: Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the military, and the Brotherhood. The latter two destroyed the former, the Brotherhood then won an election, began turning Egypt into an Islamist state, and paid the price by itself being overthrown by the real power in the land—the military. When the anti-Mubarak demonstrations were at their height, the gatherings in Cairo attracted several hundred thousand people. After Mubarak’s fall, when the radical Muslim Brotherhood preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi returned from exile in Qatar, at least a million people came out to greet him, but few in the Western media called this the “voice of the people.” The liberals never had a chance. Nor do they now. it is because if you are hungry and frightened, and you are offered either bread and security or the concept of democracy, the choice is not difficult.
In impoverished societies with few accountable institutions, power rests with gangs disguised as “militia” and “political parties.” While they fight for power, sometimes cheered on by naive Western sympathizers, many innocent people die. It looks as if it will be that way in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and possibly other countries for years to come.
An extraordinary movement of people followed as millions of Muslims fled the new borders of India, heading west to Pakistan, with millions of Hindus and Sikhs coming the other way. Columns of people thirty thousand strong were on the roads as whole communities moved.
It was carnage. Riots broke out across both countries as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others turned on one another in panic and fear. The British government washed its hands and refused pleas from the new Indian and Pakistani leaders for the few troops still in the country to help maintain order. Estimates of the death toll vary, but at least a million people died and 15 million were displaced. What did Pakistan get out of this? Much less than India. It inherited India’s most troublesome border, the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan, and it was a state split into two noncontiguous regions with little to hold it together, as one thousand miles of Indian territory separated West Pakistan from East Pakistan.
in 1971, East Pakistan rebelled against the dominance of West Pakistan, India intervened and, after much bloodshed, East Pakistan seceded, becoming Bangladesh.
Pakistan tries hard to create a sense of unity, but it remains rare for a Punjabi to marry a Baluchi, or a Sindh to marry a Pashtun. The Punjabis comprise 60 percent of the population, the Sindhs 14 percent, the Pashtuns 13.5 percent, and the Baluchis 4.5 percent. Religious tensions are ever present—not only in the antagonism sometimes shown to the country’s Christian and Hindu minorities, but also between the majority Sunni and the minority Shia Muslims. In Pakistan there are several nations within one state.
Baluchistan is of crucial importance: while it may contain only a small minority of Pakistan’s population, without it there is no Pakistan. It comprises almost 45 percent of the country and holds much of its natural gas and mineral wealth. Another source of income beckons with the proposed overland routes to bring Iranian and Caspian Sea oil up through Pakistan to China. The jewel in this particular crown is the coastal city of Gwadar. Many analysts believe this strategic asset was the Soviet Union’s long-term target when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979: Gwadar would have fulfilled Moscow’s long-held dream of a warm-water port.
A deep-water port was inaugurated in 2007 and the two countries are now working to link it to China. In the long run, China would like to use Pakistan as a land route for its energy needs. This would allow it to bypass the Strait of Malacca, which as we saw in chapter two is a choke point that could strangle Chinese economic growth.
The Chinese will build a road from the port to the airport and then onward toward China—all part of a $46 billion investment to create the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor linking China to the Arabian Sea. Because both sides know that Baluchistan is likely to remain volatile, a security force of up to twenty-five thousand men is being formed to protect the zone.
Islam, cricket, the intelligence services, the military, and fear of India are what hold Pakistan together. None of these will be enough to prevent it from being pulled apart if the forces of separatism grow stronger. In effect, Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbor, India.
If Pakistan had full control of Kashmir it would strengthen Islamabad’s foreign policy options and deny India opportunities. It would also help Pakistan’s water security. The Indus River originates in Himalayan Tibet, but passes through the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir before entering Pakistan and then running the length of the country and emptying into the Arabian Sea at Karachi. The Indus and its tributaries provide water to two-thirds of the country: without it the cotton industry and many other mainstays of Pakistan’s struggling economy would collapse. By a treaty that has been honored through all of their wars, India and Pakistan agreed to share the waters; but both populations are growing at an alarming rate, and global warming could diminish the water flow. Annexing all of Kashmir would secure Pakistan’s water supply. Given the stakes, neither side will let go; and until they agree on Kashmir the key to unlocking the hostility between them cannot be found. Kashmir looks destined to remain a place where a sporadic proxy war between Pakistani-trained fighters and the Indian army is conducted—a conflict that threatens to spill over into full-scale war with the inherent danger of the use of nuclear weapons.
The Pakistani government had always denied playing the double game that resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of Afghans and Pakistanis, as well as relatively small numbers of Americans. After the Abbottabad mission, Islamabad continued the denials, but now there were fewer people who believed them. If elements of the Pakistani establishment were prepared to give succor to America’s most wanted man, even though he was by then of limited value to them, it was obvious they would support groups that furthered their ambitions to influence events in Afghanistan. The problem was that those groups now had their counterparts in Pakistan and they wanted to influence events there. The biter was bitten. The Pakistani Taliban is a natural outgrowth of the Afghan version.
Both are predominantly Pashtun and neither will accept domination from any non-Pashtun power, be it the British army of the nineteenth century or the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani army of the twenty-first century.
This was always understood and accepted by Islamabad. The Pakistani government pretended it ruled the entire country, and the Pashtun of the North-West Frontier pretended they were loyal to the Pakistani state. This relationship worked until September 11, 2001. The years since then have been exceptionally hard on Pakistan. The civilian death toll is enormous and foreign investment has dwindled away, making ordinary life even harder. The army, forced to go up against what was a de facto ally, has lost up to five thousand men and the civil war has endangered the fragile unity of the state.
The world has so marveled at China’s stunning rise to power that its neighbor is often overlooked, but India may yet rival China as an economic powerhouse this century. It is the world’s seventh-largest country, with the second-largest population. It has borders with six countries (seven if you include Afghanistan). It has nine thousand miles of internal navigable waterways, reliable water supplies, and huge areas of arable land; is a major coal producer; has useful quantities of oil and gas, even if it will always be an importer of all three; and its subsidization of fuel and heating costs is a drain on its finances.
the rise of technology means each requires vast amounts of energy; geography has not bequeathed them such riches, and so both countries have been forced to expand their horizons and venture out into the oceans, and it is there that they have encountered each other.
INDIA
India has strengthened its ties with Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand, but more important, it is working with Vietnam and Japan to check China’s increasing domination of the South China Sea.
India has a large, well-equipped modern navy that includes an aircraft carrier, but it will not be able to compete with the massive blue-water navy that China is planning. Instead, India is aligning itself with other interested parties so together they can at least shadow, if not dominate, the Chinese navy as it sails the China seas, through the Strait of Malacca, past the Bay of Bengal, and around the tip of India into the Arabian Sea toward the friendly port China has built at Gwadar in Pakistan.
The whole of the region from Malaysia up to the Russian port of Vladivostok eyes the North/South Korea problem nervously. All the neighbors know it has the potential to blow up in their faces, dragging in other countries and damaging their economies.
NORTH KOREA
The Chinese don’t want to fight on behalf of North Korea, but nor do they want a united Korea containing American bases close to their border. The Americans don’t really want to fight for the South Koreans, but nor can they afford to be seen as giving up on a friend. The Japanese, with their long history of involvement in the Korean Peninsula, must be seen to tread lightly, knowing that whatever happens will probably involve them.
North Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River. The United States, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost thirty thousand troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.
All the actors in this East Asian drama know that if they try to force an answer to the question at the wrong time, they risk making things worse. A lot worse. It is not unreasonable to fear that you would end up with two capital cities in smoking ruins, a civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, missiles landing in and around Tokyo, and another Chinese-American military face-off on a divided peninsula in which one side has nuclear weapons. If North Korea implodes, it might well also explode, projecting instability across the borders in the form of war, terrorism, and/or a flood of refugees, and so the actors are stuck, leaving the solution to the next generation of leaders, and then the next one.
it is not run for the people and it is not a republic. It is a dynasty shared by one family and one party. It also checks off every box in the dictatorship test: arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption, and a litany of horrors on a scale without parallel in the twenty-first century. Satellite images and witness testimony suggest that at least 150,000 political prisoners are held in giant work and “reeducation” camps.
Total state control has resulted in beatings, torture, prison camps, and extrajudicial murder.
the Japanese were back, annexing the whole country in 1910, and later set about destroying its culture. The Korean language was banned, as was the teaching of Korean history, and worship at Shinto shrines became compulsory. The decades of repression have left a legacy that even today impacts on relations between Japan and both the Korean states.
In the hills above the 148-mile-long DMZ, the North Korean military has an estimated ten thousand artillery pieces. They are well dug in, some in fortified bunkers and caves. Not all of them could reach the center of Seoul, but some could, and all are able to reach the greater Seoul region. There’s little doubt that within two or three days the combined might of the South Korean and US air forces would have destroyed many of them, but by that time Seoul would be in flames. Imagine the effect of just one salvo of shells from ten thousand artillery weapons landing in urban and semi-urban areas, then multiply it dozens of times.
DPRK forces could fire up to five hundred thousand rounds toward the city in the first hour of a conflict.
The South Korean government would find itself fighting a major war while simultaneously trying to manage the chaos of millions of people fleeing south, even as it tried to reinforce the border with troops stationed below the capital.
The hills above the DMZ are not high and there is a lot of flat ground between them and Seoul. In a surprise attack, the North Korean army could push forward quite quickly, aided by special forces who would enter via underground tunnels that the South Koreans believe have already been built.
North Korea’s battle plans are thought to include submarines landing shock troops south of Seoul, and to activate sleeper cells placed in the South’s population. It is estimated to have one hundred thousand personnel it regards as Special Forces. Its armed forces are more than a million strong, one of the biggest armies in the world, and even if large numbers of them are not highly
In 1950, when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel, it had not foreseen a three-year war with up to four million deaths, ending in a stalemate. A full-scale conflict now might be even more catastrophic. The problems that would be created by Korea imploding or exploding would be multiplied if it happened as a result of warfare.
JAPAN
Japan’s history is very different to that of Korea, and the reason for this is partly due to its geography. The Japanese are an island race, with the majority of the 127 million population living mostly on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan, and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands. The largest of the main islands is Honshu, which includes the biggest megacity in the world, Tokyo, and its 39 million people.
At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some five hundred miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much closer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.
In the 1300s, the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria, and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet.
So the threat from the west and northwest was limited, and to the southeast and east there was nothing but the Pacific. This last perspective is why the Japanese gave themselves the name Nippon, or “sun origin”: looking east there was nothing between them and the horizon, and each morning, rising on that horizon, was the sun.
The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country that is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or, in European terms, bigger than France or Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 percent is suitable for intensive cultivation.
Its mountains mean that Japan has plenty of water, but the lack of flatland also means that its rivers are unsuited to navigation and therefore trade, a problem exacerbated by the fact that few of the rivers join one another. So the Japanese became a maritime people, connecting and trading along the coasts of their myriad islands, making forays into Korea, and then after centuries of isolation pushing out to dominate the whole region.
Japan remains the world’s largest importer of natural gas, and the third-largest importer of oil.
SOUTH & CENTRAL AMERICA
In some cases, for example in Peru and Argentina, the metropolitan area of the capital city contains more than 30 percent of the country’s population. The colonialists concentrated on getting the wealth out of each region, to the coast and on to foreign markets. Even after independence the predominantly European coastal elites failed to invest in the interior, and what population centers there are inland remain poorly connected with one another.
Mexico is growing into a regional power, but it will always have the desert wastelands in its north, its mountains to the east and west, and its jungles in the south, all physically limiting its economic growth. Brazil has made its appearance on the world stage, but its internal regions will remain isolated from one another;
On the western side is the Pacific, on the other the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic. None of the coastlines have many natural deep harbors, thus limiting trade.
The differences in a continent that has five different climatological regions. The relative flatland east of the Andes and temperate climate of the lower third of South America, known as the Southern Cone, are in stark contrast to the mountains and jungle farther north and enable agricultural and construction costs to be reduced, thus making them some of the most profitable regions on the entire continent—whereas Brazil, as we shall see, even has difficulty moving goods around its own domestic market.
Those south of Panama, mostly reside on, or near, the western and eastern coasts, with the interior and the freezing cold far south very sparsely populated. South America is in effect a demographically hollow continent and its coastline is often referred to as the “populated rim.”
Mexico has a 2,000-mile-long border with the United States, almost all of which is desert. The land here is so harsh that most of it is uninhabited. This acts as a buffer zone between it and its giant northern neighbor. Mexico is now in the grip of what is almost a civil war. The cartels try to control territory through intimidation; the government tries to pretend it is in charge of the rule of law; and hundreds of civilians, caught in the middle, are being killed.
The Nicaraguan canal will be longer than the Panama and, crucially, will be significantly wider and deeper, thus allowing much bigger tankers and container ships through, not to mention large Chinese naval vessels. The middle section will be dredged out of Lake Nicaragua, which has led environmentalists to warn that Latin America’s largest freshwater lake may become contaminated.
Given that the Panama Canal a few hundred miles to the south is being widened, skeptics ask why the Nicaraguan version is necessary. China will have control of a canal able to take bigger ships, which will help guarantee the economies of scale only China is capable of. China has now replaced the United States as Brazil’s main trading partner, and may do the same with several other Latin American countries.
Not including the funding of revolutions, the arming of groups, and the provision of military trainers, the United States used force in Latin America almost 50 times between 1890 and the end of the Cold War.
When the Chinese came knocking, doors quickly opened. Beijing now sells or donates arms to Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, and offers them military exchanges.
BRAZIL
Brazil, which makes up fully one-third of the land of South America, is the best example. It is almost as big as the United States, and its twenty-seven federal states equal an area bigger than the twenty-eight EU countries combined; but unlike them it lacks the infrastructure to be as rich. A third of Brazil is jungle, where it is painfully expensive, and in some areas illegal, to carve out land fit for modern human habitation. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is a long-term ecological problem for the whole world, but it is also a medium-term problem for Brazil: the government allows slash-and-burn farmers to cut down the jungle and then use the land for agriculture. But the soil is so poor that within a few years crop-growing is untenable. The farmers move on to cut down more rainforest, and once the rainforest is cut it does not grow back. The climate and soil work against the development of agriculture.
The Amazon River may be navigable in parts, but its banks are muddy and the surrounding land makes it difficult to build on. This problem, too, seriously limits the amount of profitable land available. Just below the Amazon region, in the highlands, is the savannah and, by contrast, it is a success story.
Brazil lacks the volume of trade it would like and, equally important, most of its goods are moved along its inadequate roads rather than by river, thus increasing costs. Around 25 percent of Brazilians are thought to live in the infamous favela slums. When one in four of a state’s population is in abject poverty it is difficult for that state to become rich.
ARGENTINA
Argentina has not always used its advantages to the fullest. A hundred years ago it was among the ten richest countries in the world—ahead of France and Italy. But a failure to diversify, a stratified and unfair society, a poor education system, a succession of coups d’état, and the wildly differing economic policies in the democratic period of the last thirty years has seen a
The Dead Cow, or Vaca Muerta, is a shale formation that, combined with the country’s other shale areas, could provide Argentina’s energy needs for the next 150 years with excess to export. It is situated halfway down Argentina, in Patagonia, and abuts the western border with Chile. It is the size of Belgium—which might be relatively small for a country but is large for a shale formation. So far so good, unless you are against shale-produced energy—but there is a catch. To get the gas and oil out of the shale will require massive foreign investment,
Argentina is not considered a foreign-investment-friendly country.
There’s more oil and gas farther south—in fact, so far south it’s offshore in and around islands that are British and have been since 1833. And therein lies a problem, and a news story that never goes away. What Britain calls the Falkland Islands are known as Las Malvinas by Argentina, and woe betide any Argentine who uses the F word. It is an offense in Argentina to produce a map that describes the islands as anything other than the “Islas Malvinas,”
If the Argentine invasion had happened in the present decade, Britain would not have been in a position to retake the islands, as it currently has no functioning aircraft carriers, they do now have several hundred combat troops on the islands, along with advanced radar systems, ground-to-air missiles, four Eurofighter jets, and probably a nuclear attack submarine lurking nearby most of the time. The British intend to prevent the Argentinians from even thinking they could get onto the beaches, let alone take the islands.
The Argentine air force uses planes that are decades behind the Eurofighter, and British diplomacy has ensured that an attempt by Argentina to buy up-to-date models from Spain was called off.
Buenos Aires has warned that any oil firm that drills in the Falklands/Malvinas cannot bid for a license to exploit the shale oil and gas in Patagonia’s Vaca Muerta field.
Whoever probes the potential wealth beneath the South Atlantic waters will be operating in one of the most challenging environments in the business. It gets somewhat cold and windy down there, and the seas are rough.
ARCTIC
The Arctic region includes land in parts of Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). The melting of the ice cap already allows cargo ships to make the journey through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian archipelago for several summer weeks a year, thus cutting at least a week from the transit time from Europe to China.
By 2040, the route is expected to be open for up to two months each year, transforming trade links across the High North and causing knock-on effects as far away as Egypt and Panama in terms of the revenues they enjoy from the Suez and Panama Canals.
It is thought that vast quantities of undiscovered natural gas and oil reserves may lie in the Arctic region in areas that can now be accessed. In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated that 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, and 90 billion barrels of oil are in the Arctic, with the vast majority of it offshore.
Countries and companies prepared to make the effort to get at the riches will have to brave a climate where for much of the year the days are endless night, where for the majority of the year the sea freezes to a depth of more than six feet, and where, in open water, the waves can reach forty feet high.
Running gas pipelines will not be possible in many places, and building a complex liquefaction infrastructure at sea, especially in tough conditions, is very expensive.
“Offshore fields, especially in the Arctic, are without any exaggeration our strategic reserve for the twenty-first century.”
Fast-forward to the new cold war and the strategies remain the same, even if now the Americans have withdrawn their forces from their NATO ally Iceland. Iceland has no armed forces of its own and the American withdrawal was described by the Icelandic government as “short-sighted.” In a speech to the Swedish Atlantic Council, Iceland’s Justice Minister Björn Bjarnason said: “A certain military presence should be maintained in the region, sending a signal about a nation’s interests and ambitions in a given area, since a military vacuum could be misinterpreted as a lack of national interest and priority.”
However, for at least a decade now, it has been clear that the Arctic is a priority for the Russians in a way it is not for the Americans. This is reflected in the degree of attention given to the region by both countries, or in the case of the United States, its relative inattention since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It takes up to $1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than ten feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to seventy thousand tons through the ice fields.
The United States has a fleet of one functioning heavy icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, down from the eight it possessed in the 1960s, and has no plans to build another.
The hunger for energy suggests the race is inevitable in what some Arctic specialists have called the New Great Game. There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North, a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms—in fact, a lot more of everything. The Russians not only have their nuclear-powered icebreakers, but are even considering building a floating nuclear power plant capable of withstanding the crushing weight of ten feet of ice.
There are 5.5 million square miles of ocean up in the Arctic; they can be dark, dangerous, and deadly. It is not a good place to be without friends. They know that for anyone to succeed in the region they may need to cooperate, especially on issues such as fishing stocks, smuggling, terrorism, search and rescue, and environmental disasters. Smuggling occurs wherever there are transit routes, and there is no reason to believe the Arctic will be any different; but policing it will be difficult due to the conditions there. And as more commercial vessels and cruise ships head into the area, the search-and-rescue and antiterrorism capabilities of the Arctic nations will need to grow accordingly,
Russia is probably the clearest example, naturally expanding from the small region of flatland it controlled until its heartland covered a huge space ringed mostly by mountains and the sea—with just one vulnerable point across the North European Plain. If the Russian leaders wanted to create a great nation, which they did, then they had little choice as to what to do about that weak spot. Likewise, in Europe no conscious decision was made to become a huge trading area; the long, level networks of rivers made it possible, and to an extent inevitable, over the course of millennia.
Of course, geography does not dictate the course of all events. Great ideas and great leaders are part of the push and pull of history. But they must all operate within the confines of geography. The leaders of Bangladesh might dream of preventing the waters from flooding up the Bay of Bengal, but they know that 80 percent of the country is on a floodplain and cannot be moved.
Water wars are another potential problem. Even if stable democracies were to emerge in the Middle East in the coming decades, if the waters of the Murat River, which rises in Turkey before feeding the Euphrates, were to diminish considerably, then the dams Turkey would have to build to protect its own source of life could quite easily be the cause of war with Syria and Iraq downstream.