The Summariser

Original text:

A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, and resources. But the world has changed more than they realise.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia was at peace and enmeshed in a complex global economy. Would it really sever trade ties – and threaten nuclear war – just to expand its already vast territory? Despite the many warnings, including from Vladimir Putin himself, the invasion still came as a shock.

But it wasn’t a shock to the journalist Tim Marshall. On the first page of his 2015 blockbuster book, Prisoners of Geography, Marshall invited readers to contemplate Russia’s topography. A ring of mountains and ice surrounds it. Its border with China is protected by mountain ranges, and it is separated from Iran and Turkey by the Caucasus. Between Russia and western Europe stand the Balkans, Carpathians, and Alps, which form another wall. Or they nearly do. To the north of those mountains, a flat corridor – the Great European Plain – connects Russia to its well-armed western neighbours via Ukraine and Poland. On it, you can ride a bicycle from Paris to Moscow.

You can also drive a tank. Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” The map “imprisons” leaders, Marshall had written, “giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think”.

There is a name for Marshall’s line of thinking: geopolitics. Although the term is often used loosely to mean “international relations,” it refers more precisely to the view that geography governs world affairs. Ideas, laws, and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics you must look hard at maps. And when you do, the world reveals itself to be a zero-sum contest in which every neighbour is a potential rival, and success depends on controlling territory, as in the boardgame Risk. In its cynical view of human motives, geopolitics resembles Marxism, just with topography replacing class struggle as the engine of history.

Geopolitics also resembles Marxism in that many predicted its death in the 1990s, with the Cold War’s end. The expansion of markets and the eruption of new technologies promised to make geography obsolete. “The world is flat,” the journalist Thomas Friedman declared in 2005. It was an apt metaphor for globalisation: goods, ideas, and people sliding smoothly across borders.

Yet the world feels less flat today as supply chains snap and global trade falters. Hostility toward globalisation, channelled by figures such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, was already rising before the pandemic, which boosted it. The number of border walls, about 10 at the Cold War’s end, is now 74 and climbing, with the past decade as the high point of wall-building. The post-Cold War hope for globalisation was a “delusion”, writes political scientist Élisabeth Vallet, and we’re now seeing the “reterritorialisation of the world”. “Geopolitics are back, and back with a vengeance, after this holiday from history we took in the so-called war period,” US National Security Advisor HR McMaster warned in 2017.

Geopolitical thinking is unabashedly grim, and it regards hopes for peace, justice, and rights with scepticism. The question, however, is not whether it’s bleak, but whether it’s right. Past decades have brought major technological, intellectual, and institutional changes. But are we still, as Marshall contends, “prisoners of geography”?

In the long run, we are creatures of our environments to an almost embarrassing degree, flourishing where circumstances permit and dying where they don’t. “If you look at a map of the tectonic plate boundaries grinding against each other and superimpose the locations of the world’s major ancient civilisations, an astonishingly close relationship reveals itself,” writes Lewis Dartnell in his splendid book Origins. The relationship is no accident. Plate collisions create mountain ranges and the great rivers that carry their sediment down to the lowlands, enriching the soil. Ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, and Rome were all near plate edges. The Fertile Crescent – the rich agricultural zone stretching from Egypt to Iran, where farming, writing and the wheel first emerged – lies over the intersection of three plates.

In a 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Halford Mackinder gazed at a relief map of the world and posited that history could be seen as a centuries-long struggle between the nomadic peoples of Eurasia’s plains and the seafaring ones of its coasts. Britain and its peers had thrived as oceanic powers, but now that all viable colonies were claimed, that route was closed, and future expansion would involve land conflicts. The vast plain in the “heartland” of Eurasia, Mackinder felt, would be the centre of the world’s wars.

Mackinder wasn’t wholly correct, but his predictions’ broad contours – clashes over eastern Europe, the waning of British sea power, the rise of the land powers Germany and Russia – were right enough. Beyond the details, Mackinder’s vision of imperialists running out of colonies to claim and turning on one another was prophetic. When they did, he foresaw that Eurasia’s interior would be the prize. The Heartland “offers all the prerequisites of ultimate dominance of the world”, he later wrote.

Mackinder meant that as a warning. But the German army general Karl Haushofer, believing Mackinder to possess “the greatest of all geographical worldviews”, took it as advice. Haushofer incorporated Mackinder’s insights into the emerging field of Geopolitik and passed his ideas on to Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess in the 1920s. “The German people are imprisoned within an impossible territorial area,” Hitler concluded. To survive, they must “become a world power”; to do that, they must turn east to Mackinder’s Heartland.

Throughout the 20th century, idealists searched for ways to make international relations something other than a “perpetual prize-fight”, as the British economist John Maynard Keynes put it. For Keynes and his followers, trade might accomplish this. If countries could rely on open commerce, they’d no longer have to seize territory to secure resources. For other idealists, new air-age technologies were the key. With all places linked to all others via the skies, they hoped, countries would stop squabbling over strategic spots on the map. These were hopes, though, not yet realities. The Cold War, which divided the planet into trade blocs and military alliances, kept leaders’ eyes fixed on maps.

The Cold War had divided the world economically, and its end broughtbling down. The 1990s saw a frenzy of trade agreements and institution-building: the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), Mercosur in Latin America, trade walls tum and, towering above all, the World Trade Organization.

The more countries could secure vital resources by trade, the less reason they’d have to seize land. Optimists like Thomas Friedman believed countries that were tightly woven into an economic network would forgo starting wars, for fear of losing access to the network. Friedman light-heartedly expressed this in 1996 as the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention: no two countries with McDonald’s will go to war with each other. And he wasn’t far off. Although there have been a handful of conflicts between McDonald’s-having countries, an individual’s chance of dying in a war between states has diminished remarkably since the Cold War.

At the same time as trade was diminishing the likelihood of war, military technologies changed its shape. Just months after the Berlin Wall fell, Saddam Hussein led an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This was an old-school geopolitical affair: Iraq had amassed the world’s fourth-largest army, and by seizing Kuwait, it would control two-fifths of the world’s oil reserves. What is more, its formidable ground forces were shielded by a large, trackless desert that was nearly impossible to navigate. Mackinder would have appreciated the strategy.

But the 90s were no longer the age of Mackinder. Saddam discovered this when a US-led coalition sent bombers from Louisiana, England, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the island of Diego Garcia to attack Iraq, disabling much of its infrastructure within hours. More than a month of airstrikes followed, and then coalition forces used the new satellite technology of GPS to swiftly cross the desert that Iraqis had mistaken for an impenetrable barrier. A hundred hours of ground fighting were enough to defeat Iraq’s battered army.

But has globalisation replaced geopolitics? Global exports, which had been growing rapidly since the 90s, plateaued around 2008. Today “deglobalisation” – a substantial retreat of trade – is plausible soon, and European integration has faced an enormous setback with Brexit. As if on cue, there is now also a land war in Europe. Indeed, it is a “McDonald’s war” – the fast-food chain had hundreds of locations in Russia and Ukraine. In Putin’s mind, whatever economic benefits Russia reaped from peaceful commerce were presumably outweighed by Ukraine’s warm-water ports, natural resources and strategic buffer to Russia’s vulnerable west. As Kaplan has memorably put it, this is the “revenge of geography”.

Geopoliticians say even powerful leaders can do little to defy the map. After protests ousted the Russia-friendly Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, Putin “had to annex Crimea”, Marshall writes. Though Marshall condemns Russian aggression, his tone is like the one Putin uses to justify it. One might object that Putin’s ideas and attitudes, not his map, are driving Russian belligerence, yet geopolitics makes little room for such factors. Geopoliticians excel at explaining why things won’t change. They’re less adept at explaining how things do.

It is important to note that this isn’t how actual geographers – the ones who produce maps and peer-reviewed research – write. Like geopolitical theorists, geographers believe in the power of place, but they have long insisted that places are historically shaped. Law, culture, and economics produce landscapes as much as tectonic plates do. And those landscapes change with time.

Even topography, geographers note, isn’t as immutable as geopoliticians suppose. Peter Zeihan, an American geopolitical strategist and author, has long insisted that the outsize power of the US can be attributed to its “perfect Geography of Success”. Settlers arrived in New England, encountered substandard agricultural conditions where “wheat was a hard no”, and were fortunately spurred on to claim better lands to the west. With those abundant farmlands came “the real deal”: an extensive river system allowing internal trade at a “laughably low” cost. These features, Zeihan writes, have made the US “the most powerful country in history” and will keep it so for generations.

But such factors aren’t constants. Wheat was once commonly grown in New England. It was historical events – the arrival of pests such as the hessian fly (believed to have travelled with German troops fighting in the Revolutionary war) and the exhaustion of the soil by destructive farming practices – that decreased its grain outputs. The natural rivers that Zeihan makes so much of were also variables. To work, they had to be supplemented with an expensive artificial canal system, and then, within decades, they were superseded by new technologies. Today, more US freight, by value, travels via rail, air and even pipeline than via water. Trucks haul 45 times as much value as boats or ships do.

This is another way of saying that we don’t always accept the topographies we inherit. The world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, sprouts from Dubai, which was for centuries an unpromising fishing village surrounded by desert and salt flats. Little about its relief map destined it for greatness. Its climate is sweltering, and oil sales, though once substantial, now account for less than 1% of the emirate’s economy. Turning Dubai into a business hub has meant physically remaking it in ways that defy any notion that the map is destiny. Much of Dubai’s bustling commerce passes through the Port of Jebel Ali, the largest in the Middle East. Having an enormous deep port would seem to be an important piece of geographic luck until you realise that Dubai carved it, at great expense, out of the desert.

Terraforming Dubai is, unfortunately, the least of what we can do. Global warming is scrambling the landscape, threatening to drown islands, make deserts of grasslands and turn rivers to dust. It’s bizarre how little geopolitical treatises make of this. “Any reader will have noticed that I do not deal with the question,” admits Friedman at the end of his book The Next 100 Years. Save for minor comments and asides, the same could be said of Morris’s Geography Is Destiny, Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography and Zeihan’s The Accidental Superpower.

Geopoliticians’ reluctance to reckon with the climate crisis comes from their sense that there are only two options: transcend the landscape or live with it. Either globalisation will release us from physical constraints, or we’ll remain trapped by them. And since new technologies and institutions clearly haven’t eradicated the importance of place, we must revert to geopolitics.

But are these the only options? It seems much more likely that the unravelling of globalisation won’t pitch us backwards into the 19th century but into a future full of unprecedented hazards. We’ll experience environmental constraints profoundly in that future, just not in the way geopoliticians predict. Rather, the human-made landscape, not the natural one, will shape our actions – including how we’ve remade the physical environment. Geography isn’t “unchanging”, as Kaplan writes, but volatile. And where we’re going, the old maps won’t help.

Reading notes:

• Despite warnings, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine surprised many; however, it did not surprise author Tim Marshall who, in his book Prisoners of Geography, argues that Vladimir Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine. This is chiefly due to Russia’s geographical constraints: there are no natural borders between its territories and those of its heavily armed (and NATO members) Western neighbours.
• Tim Marshall’s line of thinking is called geopolitics, a theory which suggests that geography fundamentally dictates international relations.
• After the Cold War, the expansion of markets and technology seemed to make geography (and, by extension, geopolitics) obsolete; however, nowadays, the world is experiencing the opposite, namely a “reterritorialisation” of the world, or a vengeful return or geopolitics.
• People are creatures of their environment for good reasons, mainly because of the availability of resources; there is a close relationship between the locations of ancient civilizations and tectonic plate boundaries. Plate collisions create mountain ranges and rivers that enrich the soil. Civilizations such as Greece, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, and Rome were all near plate edges. The Fertile Crescent, where farming and the wheel first emerged, lies over the intersection of three plates.
• Halford Mackinder predicted that future battles would be fought over the vast plain in the heartland of Eurasia. Although this was partially true, Mackinder’s vision was prophetic. The Germans took Mackinder’s vision for granted and acted on it.
• Trade and air-age technologies appeared to be viable solutions to the deterministic nature of geopolitics, but the Cold War forced leaders to once again keep their eyes on the map.
• Trade agreements after the Cold War: European Union, NAFTA, Mercosur, World Trade Organization (WTO).
• Thus, trade became the ultimate solution to geopolitics – trade ties and the “threats” implied in those ties could allegedly deter countries from attacking each other.
• Trade also promised to keep war at bay; however, this occurred at a time when the technology of war was also changing; changes in warfare (the example of Iraq).
• Apparently, trade does not seem to have solved the problem: the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to indicate that trade is still weaker than geography/ geopolitics.
• Immerwahr argues that geopolitics makes little room for the human factor, and geopoliticians fail to explain how things change; this is one of the many shortcomings of geopolitics.
• Geographers, as opposed to geopoliticians, insist that places are historically shaped by law, economics, etc.; the United States is a very good example of this.
• Therefore, historical events are another variable that geopoliticians fail to account for; they also fail to account for man-made changes to geography; as Dubai exemplifies, transcending the limitations of geography is possible.
• Global warming/ climate change is another variable that geopoliticians fail to account for; they underestimate its impact on geopolitical theories. In the future, environmental constraints will play a much bigger role than geographical ones.

Summary of Daniel Immerwahr’s article “Are We Really Prisoners of Geography?”:

In the article entitled “Are We Really Prisoners of Geography?” published in The Guardian on November 10, 2022, Daniel Immerwahr challenges the deterministic view of geopolitics, which suggests that geography fundamentally dictates international relations. He argues that this perspective is increasingly complicated by the modern world’s complexities, including global trade interdependencies, technological advances, and the pressing threat of climate change.

The article examines the historical evolution of geopolitics, from its inception as a theory highlighting the importance of geographical barriers and territorial control, through the era of globalisation that appeared to diminish geography’s relevance, to the present day, where old geographical narratives have regained prominence amidst global trade barriers and allegedly geopolitical conflicts, such as the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. This resurgence challenges the post-Cold War optimism about globalisation’s ability to transcend geographical constraints and points to a renewed emphasis on territory and strategic positioning.

However, Immerwahr critiques the reductionist approach of traditional geopolitics that overlooks the capacity of human ingenuity and technological innovation to overcome geographical limitations. Dubai, a fishing village transformed into a thriving business hub, is a prime example of this capacity. Additionally, the author highlights the transformative impact of trade agreements, military technologies, and historical events in shaping global affairs beyond mere geographical determinism.

Moreover, the article emphasises the emerging challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation, which introduce new geographical constraints and opportunities, thus reshaping the global geopolitical landscape in unexpected ways. This underscores the argument that while still influential, geography operates within a complex yet limited array of factors, including human-induced changes to the planet, which geopoliticians somewhat fail to gauge in their calculations.

In conclusion, Immerwahr posits that while geography continues to play a role in global affairs, its deterministic influence is mitigated by human action, technology, and the unfolding environmental crisis. The future of geopolitics, the author argues, lies not in the rigid adherence to geographical determinism but in a nuanced understanding of how geography, in its broadest sense, influences but does not solely dictate the course of human history.