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

by Tim Marshall

Broadly speaking, geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors; not just the physical landscape – the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example – but also climate, demographics, cultural regions and access to natural resources.

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

Where before I saw only a burning hamlet, I could now see its strategic importance and understand how political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities.

In Russia we see the influence of the Arctic, and how its freezing climate limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power. In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy, and now the speed at which China is seeking to change this is becoming apparent. The chapter on the USA illustrates how shrewd decisions to expand its territory in key regions allowed it to achieve its modern destiny as a two-ocean superpower. 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,

Africa is a prime example of the effects of isolation.

The chapter on the Middle East demonstrates why drawing lines on maps while disregarding the topography and, equally importantly, the geographical cultures in a given area is a recipe for trouble. ...

Meanwhile, 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.

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.

When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends, ‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’

‘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.’

However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction, partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941.

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.

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

Mongols, expanding their empire, continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the thirteenth century. The fledgling Russia then relocated north-east in and around the city of Moscow. 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.

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.

Russia, up to the Urals, is a European power in so far as it borders the European land mass, but it is not an Asian power despite bordering Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and North Korea, and having maritime borders with several countries including Japan and the USA.

Russian island in the Bering Strait is two and a half miles from an American island in the Strait, Little Diomede Island, and can be seen with the naked eye. You can indeed see Russia from America.

Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there.

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to ‘wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian ocean’, in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. Some of 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. In addition, water-borne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.

Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder that in the will attributed to Peter the Great (but possibly written for political purposes) he advised his descendants to ‘approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world.

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.

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. Russian naval ships do transit the strait, but in limited numbers, and this would not be permitted in the event of conflict. Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean, and would still have either to cross the Gibraltar Straits to gain access to the Atlantic Ocean, or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean.

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

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.

A Russian military advance in Moldova is unlikely, but the Kremlin can and does use its economic muscle and the volatile situation in Transnistria to try to influence the Moldovan government not to join the EU or NATO.

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

LNG is unlikely to completely replace Russian gas, but it will strengthen what is a weak European hand in both price negotiation and foreign policy. To prepare for a potential reduction in revenue Russia is planning pipelines heading south-east and hopes to increase sales to China.

Away from the heartland Russia does have a global political reach and uses its influence, notably in Latin America, where it buddies up to whichever South American country has the least friendly relationship with the United States, for example Venezuela.

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.

Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day.

‘China is a civilisation pretending to be a nation.’

The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

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.

Mandarin is similar to Cantonese and many other languages when written, but very different when spoken.

The Great Wall (known as the Long Wall in China) had been first built by the Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE), and on the map China was beginning to take on what we now recognise as its modern form.

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. It would be almost ninety years before the Han took charge of their own affairs with the establishment of the Ming dynasty.

It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive influx of people into urban areas and accentuated regional differences.

The Chinese look at society very differently from the West. Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual. What the West thinks of as the rights of man, the Chinese leadership thinks of as dangerous theories endangering the majority, and much of the population accepts that, at the least, the extended family comes before the individual.

‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?’

Green Water navy patrols its maritime borders, a Blue Water navy patrols the oceans.

Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that Beijing calls the ‘First Island Chain’. There is also the ‘Nine Dash Line’, more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than 200 tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbours.

All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

The Air Defence Identification Zone, the surfacing near US ships and the build-up of a navy are part of a long-term plan to weaken American resolve to defend an island 140 miles off the coast of mainland China, but 6,400 miles from the west coast of the USA.

Its lease on the new deep-water port at Gwadar, Pakistan, will be key (if the Pakistan region of Baluchistan is stable enough) to creating an alternative land route up to China.

China has locked itself into the global economy. If we don’t buy, they don’t make. And if they don’t make there will be mass unemployment.

The last of the original thirteen colonies to be established was Georgia in 1732. The thirteen became increasingly independently minded all the way up to the American Revolutionary War (1775–83).

At the stroke of a pen, and the handing over of $15 million, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the USA and gave it mastery over the greatest inland water transport route in the world.