The Revenge of Geography? A Critique p. 1

In the last weekend reading round-up, I linked to Robert D. Kaplan's latest in Foreign Affairs, with the promise that I would offer a critique of the argument and the assumptions underpinning it. So here is the first installment which provides a breakdown of Kaplan's argument as I see it.

Kaplan's argument starts with an unfounded assertion that the failure of Iraq has revealed the inherent wisdom of political realism. The implication is that we have no choice in:

• recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization...And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

As such, 'like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a...geographic logic'.

And where does Kaplan identify these deterministic faultlines? He revives the geopolitical thought of Victorian scholar Sir Halford Mackinder. Specifically, he is interested in Mackinder's notion of the 'pivot of history', an analysis of the Eurasian heartland undertaken in 1904(see the image above), which argued that the fate of global empires rests on controlling Russia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Taking cues from Mackinder, Kaplan argues that:

• the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold.

However, in sharp contrast to the context of Victorian imperialism within which Mackinder was writing, Kaplan asserts that we are on the cusp of having to deal with

• a Eurasia of vast urban areas, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational media...[with]constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors transported at the speed of light from one Third World megalopolis to another.

Thus, his argument is that Eurasia will be the locus of global instability for the foreseeable future with the Indian subcontinent, Arabian peninsula, Fertile Crescent, and Persian core, stretching from the Caspian Sea to Iran’s north to the Persian Gulf to its south serving as 'shatter zones'.

Kaplan believes that these developments require revisions to Mackinder’s though for:

• This new map of Eurasia—tighter, more integrated, and more crowded—will be even less stable than Mackinder thought. Rather than heartlands and marginal zones that imply separateness, we will have a series of inner and outer cores that are fused together through mass politics and shared paranoia. In fact, much of Eurasia will eventually be as claustrophobic as Israel and the Palestinian territories, with geography controlling everything and no room to maneuver.

His argument concludes that if we are going to be adequately insulated from the disintegrating effects of shatter zones, geographical determinism must feature in our security policy-making. In particular, Kaplan implores us to 'learn to think like Victorians.. [ because] 'denying the facts of geography only invites disasters that, in turn, make us victims of geography.' 

Tomorrow, I will begin to pick apart the line of argumentation, the assumptions it rests upon, and how a specific ideology underpins his supposedly depoliticized 'pragmatism'.