Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors; not just the physical landscape

Geography is clearly a fundamental part of the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’.

Individual leaders, ideas, technology and other factors all play a role in shaping events, but they are temporary.

Each new generation will still face the physical obstructions created by the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas; the challenges created by the rainy season; and the disadvantages of limited access to natural minerals or food sources.

The rules of geography, which Hannibal, Sun Tzu and Alexander the Great all knew, still apply to today’s leaders.

Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. It suggests that nature is more powerful than man, and that we can only go so far in determining our own fate.

Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’,

‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’

a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941.

it is geography that protects Russia.

1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defence of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression.

In response, most of the Communist states of Europe

under Russian leadership – formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military...

after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it c...

By 2004, just fifteen years from 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia was in NATO or the European Union.

Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar.

attack as defence

Without his character of both utter ruthlessness and vision, Russian history would be very different.

Peter the Great, who founded the Russian Empire in 1721, and then Empress Catherine the Great

Russia is the biggest country in the world, twice the size of the USA or China, five times the size of India, seventy times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population of about 144 million, fewer people than Nigeria or Pakistan. Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones which Moscow governs.

Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there.

lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles heel,

Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas.

The exceptions to this rule are 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.

The neutral countries – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan

In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia.

Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO

for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line.

the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey – now a NATO member –

Rule A, Lesson One, in ‘Diplomacy for Beginners’: when faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force.

‘Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.’

annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests

outbreak of violence there in the summer of 2017 left several Ukrainian soldiers dead,

USA to consider upping its military assistance to Ukraine,

2018, the Russian coastguard intercepted three Ukrainian ships heading from Odessa, in the Black Sea, towards the Ukrainian base in Mariupol, in the Sea of Azov.

NATO’s message to Russia in the summer of 2014 was, ‘This far west and no further.’

Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter, which states: ‘An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’,

Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001,

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 tsarist, Communist or crony capitalist – the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.

twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy;

the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt – the cradle of its civilisation, where its people learnt to farm, to make paper and gunpowder.

China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power.

It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected.

‘Total control for the Communist Party in a Capitalist Economy’.

2,906-mile-long border with Mongolia.

Straddling this border is the Gobi Desert.

In the 1950s the Chinese Communist People’s Army began building roads into Tibet,

There was, is and always will be trouble in Xinjiang.

– the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan.

If the population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict.