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

by Tim Marshall

Europe shows us the value of flat land and navigable rivers in connecting regions with each other and producing a culture able to kick-start the modern world,

Latin America is an anomaly. In its far south it is so cut off from the outside world that global trading is difficult, and its internal geography is a barrier to creating a trading bloc as successful as the EU.

‘I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.’

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, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.

In 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 defence and mutual aid.

This early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Muscovy, was indefensible. There were no mountains, no deserts and few rivers. In all directions lay flatland, and across the steppe to the south and east were the Mongols.

Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defence – i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outwards. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history.

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.

Now there was a huge ring around Moscow which was the heart of the country. Starting at the Arctic, it came down through the Baltic region, across Ukraine, then the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian, swinging back round to the Urals, which stretched up to the Arctic Circle.

Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones which Moscow governs.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled the space to prevent anyone else from doing so.

the ports on the Arctic 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.

no invading power has ever succeeded in Afghanistan, earning it the label of ‘the Graveyard of Empires’. The Afghan experience is sometimes called ‘Russia’s Vietnam’; Moscow’s dream of warm water open sea lanes has seeped away ever since, and is perhaps further now than it has been for 200 years.

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.

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 (another reason for the rebellion there). The largest of these, Kazakhstan, leans towards Russia diplomatically and its large Russian-minority population is well integrated.

Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which would all like to join both organisations but are being held at arm’s length because of their geographic proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil.

As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable.

For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests which were eventually to overthrow him.

Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice – he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but, most importantly, the port of Sevastopol.

Sevastopol is Russia’s only true major warm-water port. However, access out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is restricted by the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey – now a NATO member – control of the Bosporus.

Another strategic problem is that in the event of war the Russian navy cannot get out of the Baltic Sea either, due to the Skagerrak Strait, which connects to the North Sea. The narrow strait is controlled by NATO members Denmark and Norway; and even if the ships made it, the route to the Atlantic goes through what is known as the GIUK gap (Greenland/Iceland/UK)

Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow for ever.

Ukraine needed to be protected. The Kremlin has a law which compels the government to protect ‘ethnic Russians’. A definition of that term is, by design, hard to come by because it will be defined as Russia chooses in each of the potential crises which may erupt in the former Soviet Union.

the new citizenship law will be used, which states that if your grandparents lived in Russia, and Russian is your native language, you can take Russian citizenship.

Approximately 60 per cent of Crimea’s population is ‘ethnically Russian’, so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations, and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he ‘had’ to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army, and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again a de facto part of Russia.

they could not cope with losing Crimea, the West could. The EU imposed limited sanctions – limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and off. Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years, and the concept of ‘ethnic Russians’ will be used to justify whatever moves Russia makes.

Putin briefly referred to ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘New Russia’. The Kremlin-watchers took a deep breath. He had revived the geographic title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. Catherine went on to settle Russians in these regions and demanded that Russian be the first language.

Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage.

Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, ‘Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.’

armed attack against any of them by Russia would trigger 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’, and goes on to say NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan.

Moldova presents a different problem for all sides. An attack on the country by Russia would necessitate crossing through Ukraine, over the Dnieper River and then over another sovereign border into Moldova. It could be done – at the cost of significant loss of life and by using Odessa as a staging post – but there would be no deniability. Although it might not trigger war with NATO (Moldova is not a member), it would provoke sanctions against Moscow at a level hitherto unseen, and confirm what this writer believes to already be the case – that the cooling relationship between Russia and the West is already the New Cold War. The coming to power of Donald Trump has caused some analysts to suggest that Russia believes it may have a ‘green light’ to take further action in Ukraine. However, within weeks of taking office the president’s defence secretary and secretary of state fired several salvoes of verbal warning shots aimed at Moscow, which suggested that although the White House might seek better relations with Russia, the realities of geopolitics mean there are limits beyond which Moscow would be wise not to venture. A number of countries that were once members of the Soviet Union aspire to closer ties with Europe, but with certain regions, such as Transnistria in Moldova, remaining heavily pro-Russian, there is potential for future conflict.

Modern Transnistria is now at least 50 per cent Russian or Ukrainian-speaking, and that part of the population is pro-Russian. When Moldova became independent in 1991, the Russian-speaking population rebelled and, after a brief period of fighting, declared a breakaway Republic of Transnistria.

As in Ukraine, people instinctively know the truism everyone in the neighbourhood recognises: that Washington is far away, and Moscow is near.

On average, more than 25 per cent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency, reducing its foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania 80 per cent; and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia,

Bulgaria effectively pulled the plug on the project by saying the pipelines would not come across its territory. President Putin reacted by reaching out to Turkey with a new proposal, sometimes known as the Turk Stream.

Enter the Americans, with a win-win strategy for the USA and Europe. Noting that Europe wants gas, and not wanting to be seen to be weak in the face of Russian foreign policy, the Americans believe they have the answer. The massive boom in shale gas production in the USA is not only enabling it to be self-sufficient in energy, but also to sell its surplus to one of the great energy consumers – Europe.

A lot was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel, and lower still in 2015. Moscow’s 2016 budget and predicted spending for 2017 was based on prices of $50, and even though Russia began pumping record levels of oil, it knows it cannot balance the books. Russia loses about $2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price

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.

At home, Russia is facing many challenges, not least of which is demographic. The sharp decline in population growth may have been arrested, but it remains a problem. The average lifespan for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states,

The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn’t noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative,

intent, the Chinese hove into view off their own coast with a clear message: ‘We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea.’

Until now China has never been a naval power – with its large land mass, multiple borders and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive.

The concept of China as an inhabited entity began almost 4,000 years ago. The birthplace of Chinese civilisation is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain. A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River Basin and down past the Yangtze River,

By 1500 BCE in this heartland, out of hundreds of mini city-states, many warring with each other, emerged the earliest version of a Chinese state – the Shang dynasty. This is where what became known as the Han people emerged, protecting the heartland and creating a buffer zone around them. The Han now make up over 90 per cent of China’s population and they dominate Chinese politics and business.

About a billion people live in this part of China, despite it being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 327 million.

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

By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilised China and the ‘barbarous’ regions which surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people.

The Sui dynasty (581–618 ce) had harnessed the vast numbers of workers under its control and used them to connect existing natural tributaries into a navigable waterway between the two great rivers. This tied the northern and southern Han to each other more closely than ever before. 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 which exists to this day, that of flooding. The

The Mongols defeated whichever dynasty, north or south, they came up against and by 1279 their leader Kublai Khan became the first foreigner to rule all of the country as Emperor of the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty.