Kaplan:
Geography increasingly fuels endless chaos
and old-school conflicts in the 21st Century.
This
isn’t what the 21st century was supposed to look like. The visceral reaction of
many pundits, academics and Obama Administration officials to Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s virtual annexation of Crimea has been disbelief bordering on
disorientation. As Secretary of State John Kerry said, “It’s really 19th
century behavior in the 21st century.” Well, the “19th century,” as Kerry calls
it, lives on and always will. Forget about the world being flat. Forget
technology as the great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law.
Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us
human.
Geography
hasn’t gone away. The global elite–leading academics, intellectuals, foreign
policy analysts, foundation heads and corporate power brokers, as well as many
Western leaders–may largely have forgotten about it. But what we’re witnessing
now is geography’s revenge: in the East-West struggle for control of the buffer
state of Ukraine, in the post–Arab Spring fracturing of artificial Middle
Eastern states into ethnic and sectarian fiefs and in the unprecedented arms
race being undertaken by East Asian states as they dispute potentially
resource-rich waters. Technology hasn’t negated geography; it has only made it
more precious and claustrophobic.
Whereas
the West has come to think about international relations in terms of laws and
multinational agreements, most of the rest of the world still thinks in terms
of deserts, mountain ranges, all-weather ports and tracts of land and water.
The world is back to the maps of elementary school as a starting point for an
understanding of history, culture, religion and ethnicity–not to mention power
struggles over trade routes and natural resources.
The
post–Cold War era was supposed to be about economics, interdependence and
universal values trumping the instincts of nationalism and nationalism’s
related obsession with the domination of geographic space. But Putin’s actions
betray a singular truth, one that the U.S. should remember as it looks outward
and around the globe: international relations are still about who can do what
to whom.
Putin’s Power Play
So what
has Putin done? The Russian leader has used geography to his advantage. He has
acted, in other words, according to geopolitics, the battle for space and power
played out in a geographical setting–a concept that has not changed since
antiquity (and yet one to which many Western diplomats and academics have
lately seemed deaf).
Europe’s
modern era is supposed to be about the European Union triumphing over the bonds
of blood and ethnicity, building a system of laws from Iberia to the Black
Sea–and eventually from Lisbon to Moscow. But the E.U.’s long financial crisis
has weakened its political influence in Central and Eastern Europe. And while
its democratic ideals have been appealing to many in Ukraine, the dictates of
geography make it nearly impossible for that nation to reorient itself entirely
toward the West.
Russia
is still big, and Russia is still autocratic–after all, it remains a sprawling
and insecure land power that has enjoyed no cartographic impediments to
invasion from French, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians and Poles over the course of
its history. The southern Crimean Peninsula is still heavily ethnic Russian,
and it is the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, providing Russia’s only outlet
to the Mediterranean.
Seeing
that he could no longer control Ukraine by manipulating its democracy through
President Viktor Yanukovych’s neo-czardom, Putin opted for a more direct and
mechanical approach. He took de facto control of pro-Russian Crimea, which for
all intents and purposes was already within his sphere of influence. Besides,
the home of Russia’s warm-water fleet could never be allowed to fall under the
sway of a pro-Western government in Kiev.
Next,
Putin ordered military maneuvers in the part of Russia adjoining eastern
Ukraine, involving more than 10,000 troops, in order to demonstrate Russia’s
geographical supremacy over the half of Ukraine that is pro-Russian as well as
the part of Ukraine blessed with large shale-gas reserves. Putin knows–as does
the West–that a flat topography along the long border between Russia and
Ukraine grants Moscow an overwhelming advantage not only militarily but also in
terms of disrupting trade and energy flows to Kiev. While Ukraine has natural
gas of its own, it relies on Russia’s far vaster reserves to fuel its domestic
economy.
Putin
is not likely to invade eastern Ukraine in a conventional way. In order to
exercise dominance, he doesn’t need to. Instead he will send in secessionists,
instigate disturbances, probe the frontier with Russian troops and in other
ways use the porous border with Ukraine to undermine both eastern Ukraine’s
sovereignty and its links to western Ukraine.
In
short, he will use every geographical and linguistic advantage to weaken
Ukraine as a state. Ukraine is simply located too far east, and is too spatially
exposed to Russia, for it ever to be in the interests of any government in
Moscow–democratic or not–to allow Ukraine’s complete alignment with the
West.
Back to a Zero-Sum Middle East
Another
way to describe what is going on around the world now is old-fashioned zero-sum
power politics. It is easy to forget that many Western policymakers and
thinkers have grown up in conditions of unprecedented security and prosperity,
and they have been intellectually formed by the post–Cold War world, in which
it was widely believed that a new set of coolly rational rules would drive
foreign policy. But leaders beyond America and Europe tend to be highly
territorial in their thinking. For them, international relations are a struggle
for survival. As a result, Western leaders often think in universal terms,
while rulers in places like Russia, the Middle East and East Asia think in
narrower terms: those that provide advantage to their nations or their ethnic
groups only.
We can
see this disconnect in the Middle East, which is unraveling in ways that would
be familiar to a 19th century geographer but less intuitive to a Washington
policy wonk. The Arab Spring was hailed for months as the birth pangs of a new
kind of regional democracy. It quickly became a crisis in central authority,
producing not democracy but religious war in Syria, chaos in Yemen and Libya
and renewed dictatorship in Egypt as a popular reaction to incipient chaos and
Islamic extremism. Tunisia, seen by some as the lone success story of the Arab
Spring, is a mere fledgling democracy with land borders it can no longer
adequately control, especially in the southern desert areas where its frontiers
meet those of Algeria and Libya–a situation aggravated by Libya’s collapse.
Meanwhile,
Tripoli is no longer the capital of Libya but instead the central dispatch
point for negotiations among tribes, militias and gangs for control of
territory. Damascus is not the capital of Syria but only that of Syria’s most
powerful warlord, Bashar Assad. Baghdad totters on as the capital of a
tribalized Shi’ite Mesopotamia dominated by adjacent Iran–with a virtually
independent Kurdish entity to its mountainous north and a jihadist Sunnistan to
its west, the latter of which has joined a chaotic void populated by literally
hundreds of war bands extending deep across a flat desert terrain into Syria as
far as the Mediterranean.
Hovering
above this devolution of Middle Eastern states into anarchic warlorddoms is the
epic geographic struggle between a great Shi’ite state occupying the Iranian
Plateau and a medieval-style Sunni monarchy occupying much of the Arabian
Peninsula. The interminable violence and repression in eastern Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain and Sunnistan (covering both western Iraq and Syria) are fueled by this
Saudi-Iranian proxy war. Because Iran is developing the technological and
scientific base with which to assemble nuclear weapons, Israel finds itself in
a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu can be defined by his zero-sum geographic fears, including that of
the tyranny of distance: the difficulty of his relatively small air force to
travel a thousand miles eastward, which bedevils his search for an acceptable
military option against Iran. This helps make him what he is: an obstinate
negotiating partner for both the Palestinians and the Americans.
Pacific Projection
Then
there is the most important part of the world for the U.S., the part with two
of the three largest economies (China and Japan) and the home of critical
American treaty allies: the Asia-Pacific region. This region too is undeniably
far less stable now than at the start of the 21st century, and for reasons that
can best be explained by geography.
In the
early Cold War decades, Asian countries were preoccupied with their internal
affairs. China, under Mao Zedong’s depredations and Deng Xiaoping’s economic
reforms, was inwardly focused. Vietnam, the current territory of Malaysia and
to a lesser extent the Philippines were overwhelmed by internal wars and
rebellions. Singapore was building a viable city-state from scratch. And South
Korea and Japan were recovering from major wars.
Now
these states have consolidated their domestic affairs and built strong
institutions. They have all, with the exception of the poverty-racked
Philippines, benefited from many years of capitalist-style growth. But strong
institutions and capitalist prosperity lead to military ambitions, and so all
of these states since the 1990s have been enlarging or modernizing their navies
and air forces–a staggering military buildup to which the American media have
paid relatively scant attention.
Since
the 1990s, Asia’s share of military imports has risen from 15% to 41% of the
world total, and its overall military spending has risen from 11% to 20% of all
global military expenditures. And what are these countries doing with all of
these new submarines, warships, fighter jets, ballistic missiles and
cyberwarfare capabilities? They are contesting with one another lines on the
map in the blue water of the South China and East China seas: Who controls what
island, atoll or other geographical feature above or below water–for reserves
of oil and natural gas might lie nearby? Nationalism, especially that based on
race and ethnicity, fired up by territorial claims, may be frowned upon in the
modern West, but it is alive and well throughout prosperous East Asia.
Notice
that all these disputes are, once again, not about ideas or economics or
politics even but rather about territory. The various claims between China and
Japan in the East China Sea, and between China and all the other pleaders in
the South China Sea (principally Vietnam and the Philippines), are so complex
that while theoretically solvable through negotiation, they are more likely to
be held in check by a stable balance-of-power system agreed to by the U.S. and
Chinese navies and air forces. The 21st century map of the Pacific Basin,
clogged as it is with warships, is like a map of conflict-prone Europe from
previous centuries. Though war may ultimately be avoided in East Asia, the
Pacific will show us a more anxious, complicated world order, explained best by
such familiar factors as physical terrain, clashing peoples, natural resources
and contested trade routes.
India
and China, because of the high wall of the Himalayas, have developed for most
of history as two great world civilizations having relatively little to do with
each other. But the collapse of distance in the past 50 years has turned them
into strategic competitors in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. (This
is how technology abets rather than alleviates conflict.) And if Narendra Modi
of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is elected by a significant
majority in elections in April and May, as is expected by many, India will
likely pursue a fiercely geopolitical foreign policy, aligning even more
strongly with Japan against China.
China,
meanwhile, faces profound economic troubles in the coming years. The upshot
will be more regime-stoked nationalism directed at the territorial disputes in
the South China and East China seas and more rebellions at home from regionally
based ethnic groups such as the Turkic Muslim Uighurs, in the west abutting
Central Asia, and the Tibetans, in the southwest close to India. Can the Han
Chinese, who inhabit the arable cradle of China and make up 90% of the
country’s population, keep the minorities on the upland peripheries under
control during a sustained period of economic and social unrest? The great
existential question about China’s future is about control of its borderlands,
not its currency.
Practically
anywhere you look around the globe, geography confounds. Burma is slowly being
liberated from benighted military dictatorship only to see its Muslim minority
Rohingyas suffer murder and rape at the hands of Burmese nationalist groups.
The decline of authoritarianism in Burma reveals a country undermined by
geographically based ethnic groups with their own armies and militias.
Similarly, sub-Saharan African economies have been growing dramatically as
middle classes emerge across that continent. Yet at the same time, absolute
population growth and resource scarcity have aggravated ethnic and religious
conflicts over territory, as in the adjoining Central African Republic and
South Sudan in the heart of the continent, which have dissolved into religious
and tribal war.
What’s New Is Old Again
Of
course, civil society of the kind Western elites pine for is the only answer
for most of these problems. The rule of law, combined with decentralization in
the cases of sprawling countries such as Russia and Burma, alone can provide
for stability–as it has over the centuries in Europe and the Americas. But
working toward that goal requires undiluted realism about the unpleasant facts
on the ground.
To live
in a world where geography is respected and not ignored is to understand the
constraints under which political leaders labor. Many obstacles simply cannot
be overcome. That is why the greatest statesmen work near the edges of what is
possible. Geography establishes the broad parameters–only within its bounds
does human agency have a chance to succeed.
Thus,
Ukraine can become a prosperous civil society, but because of its location it
will always require a strong and stable relationship with Russia. The Arab
world can eventually stabilize, but Western militaries cannot set complex and
highly populous Islamic societies to rights except at great cost to themselves.
East Asia can avoid war but only by working with the forces of ethnic
nationalism at play there.
If
there is good news here, it is that most of the borders that are being
redrawn–or just reunderlined–exist within states rather than between them. A
profound level of upheaval is occurring that, in many cases, precludes military
intervention. The vast human cataclysms of the 20th century will not likely
repeat themselves. But the worldwide civil society that the elites thought they
could engineer is a chimera. The geographical forces at work will not be easily
tamed.
While
our foreign policy must be morally based, the analysis behind it must be
cold-blooded, with geography as its starting point. In geopolitics, the past
never dies and there is no modern world.
