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

by Tim Marshall

The Pakistani Taliban is a natural outgrowth of the Afghan version. Both are predominantly Pashtun and neither will accept domination from any non-Pashtun power, be it the British army of the nineteenth century or the Punjabi dominated Pakistani army of the twenty-first century.

The Pakistanis will maintain enough links with the Afghan Talibs to ensure that governments in Kabul will listen to Islamabad and not cosy up to India, and once the pressure is off they can do a deal with the Pakistani Taliban.

North Korea continues to play the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect. Its foreign policy consists, essentially, of being suspicious of everyone except the Chinese, and even Beijing is not to be fully trusted despite supplying 84.12 per cent of North Korea’s imports and buying 84.48 per cent of its exports, according to 2014 figures by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

The Mongols came and went, as did the Chinese Qing dynasty and the Japanese several times. So for a while the country preferred not to engage with the outside world, cutting many of its trade links in the hope that it would be left alone.

The defeat of Japan in 1945 left Korea divided along the 38th parallel. North of it was a Communist regime overseen first by the Soviets and later by Communist China, south of the line was a pro-American dictatorship called the Republic of Korea (ROK).

There are parallels here with the USA’s policy in modern East Asia and Eastern Europe. Countries such as Poland, the Baltic States, Japan and the Philippines need to be confident that America has their back when it comes to their relations with Russia and China. In September 1950 the USA, leading a United Nations force, surged into Korea, pushing the Northern troops back across the 38th parallel and then up almost to the Yalu River and the border with China.

A major concern for South Korea is how close Seoul and the surrounding urban areas are to the border with North Korea.

The two countries still have a territorial dispute over what South Korea calls the Dokdo (solitary) Islands and the Japanese know as the Takeshima (bamboo) islands. The South Koreans currently control the rocky outcrops, which are in good fishing grounds, and there may be gas reserves in the region. Despite this thorn in their sides, and the still-fresh memories of occupation, both have reasons to co-operate and leave behind their troubled past.

In the 1300s the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet. The seas in the Korean Strait were whipped up by what the Japanese said was a ‘Divine Wind’ which they called a ‘kamikaze’.

The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country which is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or in European terms bigger than Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 per cent is suitable for intensive cultivation. This leaves the Japanese living in close proximity to each other along the coastal plains and in restricted inland areas, where some stepped rice fields can exist in the hills.

However, the very same island-nation geography that had allowed it to remain isolated was now giving it no choice but to engage with the world. The problem was that it chose to engage militarily.

Both the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War were fought to thwart Chinese and Russian influence in Korea.

It had already occupied Taiwan in 1895 and followed this up with the annexation of Korea in 1910. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1932, then conducted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937.

There were sections of the older generation who had never accepted the enormity of Japan’s war crimes, and sections of the younger who were not prepared to accept guilt for the sins of their fathers. Many of the children of the Land of the Rising Sun wanted their ‘natural’ place under the sun of the post-war world.

Many Japanese, especially on Okinawa, resent the US military presence, but the might of China, added to the decline in the Japanese population, is likely to ensure that the post-war USA–Japan relationship continues, albeit on a more equal basis.

Japan and South Korea have plenty to argue about, but will agree that their shared anxiety about China and North Korea will overcome this.

In the USA, once the land had been taken from its original inhabitants, much of it was sold or given away to small landholders; by contrast, in Latin America the Old World culture of powerful landowners and serfs was imposed, which led to inequality.

Most of the countries’ biggest cities, often the capitals, were therefore near the coasts, and all roads from the interior were developed to connect to the capitals but not to each other.

running parallel to the Pacific for 4,500 miles, is the longest continuous mountain chain in the world – the Andes.

The relative flatland east of the Andes and temperate climate of the lower third of South America, known as the Southern Cone, are in stark contrast to the mountains and jungle further north and enable agricultural and construction costs to be reduced, thus making them some of the most profitable regions on the entire continent – whereas Brazil, as we shall see, even has difficulty moving goods around its own domestic market.

Despite its remoteness from history’s major population centres, there have been people living south of what is now the Mexico–USA border for about 15,000 years. They are thought to have originated from Russia and crossed the Bering Strait on foot at a time when it was still land. The present-day inhabitants are a mixture of Europeans, Africans, indigenous tribes and the Mestizo population, who are of European and native American descent.

Particularly bitter is the relationship between Bolivia and Chile, which dates back to the 1879 War of the Pacific in which Bolivia lost a large chunk of its territory, including 250 miles of coastline, and has been landlocked ever since. It has never recovered from this blow,

The route partially follows the Pan-American Highway, which runs south to north up the continent. Originally designed to move goods in each direction to a variety of countries, it is now also used to move drugs north to the USA. This in turn led the Mexican drug gangs to get in on the action by facilitating the routes and manufacturing their own produce.

China, as we saw in Chapter Two, has designs on being a global power and to achieve this aim it will need to keep sea lanes open for its commerce and its navy. The Panama Canal may well be a neutral passageway, but at the end of the day passage through it is dependent on American goodwill. So, why not build your own canal up the road in Nicaragua?

China is lending huge sums of money to Latin American governments, notably those in Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador. In return China will be expecting support in the United Nations for its regional claims back home, including the issue of Taiwan.

The foundations for this potential were laid in the nineteenth century with military victories over Brazil and Paraguay that resulted in control of the flat agricultural regions of the Rio de la Plata, the navigable river system, and therefore the commerce which flows down it towards Buenos Aires and its port. This is among the most valuable pieces of real estate on the whole continent.

A hundred years ago it was among the ten richest countries in the world – ahead of France and Italy. But a failure to diversify, a stratified and unfair society, a poor education system, a succession of coups d’état and the wildly differing economic policies in the democratic period of the last thirty years have seen a sharp decline in Argentina’s status.

The word ‘arctic’ comes from the Greek arktikos, which means ‘near the bear’, and is a reference to the Ursa Major constellation whose last two stars point towards the North Star.

In 2007 it sent two manned submersibles 13,980 feet below the waves to the seabed of the North Pole and planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag as a statement of ambition. As far as is known, it still ‘flies’ down there today. A Russian think-tank followed this up by suggesting that the Arctic be renamed. After not much thought they came up with an alternative: ‘the Russian Ocean’.

In April 2019 there was a comically serious incident when Norway encountered a beluga whale it suspected of being used by Russia for spying. The whale was wearing a strange Russian-made harness in which, it was claimed, a GoPro camera could fit. On the harness were the words ‘Equipment of St Petersburg’. A Russian colonel commented, ‘Do you really think we’d attach a mobile phone number with the message “Please call this number”?’