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

by Tim Marshall

The authorities’ crackdown will continue, the Free Tibet movement will continue, monks will continue to set themselves on fire to bring the plight of the Tibetans to the world’s attention – and the Han will keep coming.

Irony Of Tibet

The Indians fear that the Chinese could make a lightning dash down into India, cutting off what is known as Chicken’s Neck, a relatively narrow stretch of land above Bangladesh that joins West India to East. Cut that and you divide one from the other – which would be a nightmare for India.

The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of ‘East Turkestan’, in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbours in the ‘Stans’ becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China. Inter-ethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to over 200 deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers.

There is a ‘World Uighur Congress’ based in Germany, and the ‘East Turkestan Liberation Movement’ set up in Turkey; but Uighur separatists lack a Dalai Lama-type figure upon whom foreign media can fix, and until recently their cause was almost unknown around the world. China tries to keep it that way, ensuring it stays on good terms with as many border countries as possible in order to prevent any organised independence movement from having supply lines or somewhere to which it could fall back. Beijing also paints separatists as Islamist terrorists. Al Qaeda and other groups, which have a foothold in places like Tajikistan, are indeed attempting to forge links with the Uighur separatists, but the movement is nationalist first, Islamic second. However, gun, bomb and knife attacks in the region against state and/or Han targets over the past few years do look as if they will continue, and could escalate into a full-blown uprising.

Beijing’s response has been to incarcerate huge numbers of Uighurs in ‘re-education camps’. How many people are being held is known only to the Chinese authorities, but estimates range from 150,000 to 1 million. It is alleged that inmates are banned from praying or growing beards as part of a policy designed to strip the Uighurs of their religious beliefs. In April 2019 China denied the allegations, called the camps ‘boarding schools’ and said it had arrested about 13,000 terrorists and ‘broken up hundreds of terrorist gangs’.

China will not cede this territory and, as in Tibet, the window for independence is closing. Both are buffer zones, one is a major land trade route, and – crucially – both offer markets (albeit with a limited income) for an economy which must keep producing and selling goods if it is to continue to grow and to prevent mass unemployment. Failure to so do would likely lead to widespread civil disorder, threatening the control of the Communist Party and the unity of China.

The Curse for communist party of China

There are similar reasons for the Party’s resistance to democracy and individual rights. 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. That in turn would embolden the people of the buffer zones, further weakening China. It is only a century since the most recent humiliation of the rape of China by foreign powers; for Beijing, unity and economic progress are priorities well ahead of democratic principles.

Why China discourages democracy

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.

China Fears

I once took a Chinese ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope they would repeat Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s much-quoted answer to Richard Nixon’s question ‘What is the impact of the French Revolution?’, to which the prime minister replied ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ Sadly this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of ‘what you call human rights’ in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, ‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?’

The deal between the Party leaders and the people has been, for a generation now, ‘We’ll make you better off – you will follow our orders.’ So long as the economy keeps growing, that grand bargain may last. If it stops, or goes into reverse, the deal is off. The current level of demonstrations and anger against ...

Another growing problem for the Party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40 per cent of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture. China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrialising as it modernises and raises standards of living, but that very ...

There are now around 500 mostly peaceful protests a day across China over a variety of issues. If you introduce mass unemployment, or mass hunger, that tally will explode in both number and the degree of force used by both sides. So, on the economic side China now also has a grand barga...

National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the Chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime they could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

The message from Tokyo is: ‘We know you’re going out there, but don’t mess with us on the way out.’

During the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong, one of the reasons the authorities did not quickly batter them off the streets – as they would have done in, for example, Ürümqi – was that the world’s cameras were there and would have captured the violence. In China much of this footage would be blocked, but in Taiwan people would see what the rest of the world saw and ask themselves how close a relationship they wanted with such a power. Beijing hesitated; it is playing the long game.

The soft-power approach is to persuade the people of Taiwan they have nothing to fear in rejoining the ‘Motherland’. 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.

China must secure the routes through the South China Sea, both for its goods to get to market, and for the items required to make those goods – oil, gas and precious metals among them – to get into China. It cannot afford to be blockaded. Diplomacy is one solution; the ever-growing navy is another; but the best guarantees are pipelines, roads and ports.

The geopolitical writer Robert Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Americans, having consolidated their land mass, had become a two-ocean power (Atlantic and Pacific), and then moved to control the seas around them, pushing the Spanish out of Cuba.

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. If there is mass and long-term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be – like everything else in modern China – on a scale hitherto unseen.

Mexico’s population at the time was 6.2 million, the USA’s 9.6 million. The US army may have been able to see off the mighty British, but they had been fighting 3,000 miles from home with supply lines across an ocean. The Mexicans were next door.

The Texas Revolution of 1835–6 drove the Mexicans out, but it was a close-run thing, and had the settlers lost then the Mexican army would have been in a position to march on New Orleans and control the southern end of the Mississippi. It is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of modern history.

Most subsequent presidents bore in mind George Washington’s advice in his farewell address in 1796 not to get involved in ‘inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others’, and to ‘steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world’.

A century earlier, the British had learnt they needed forward bases and coaling stations from which to project and protect their naval power. Now, with Britain in decline, the Americans looked lasciviously at the British assets and said, ‘Nice bases – we’ll have them.’ The price was right. In the autumn of 1940 the British had desperately needed more warships. The Americans had fifty spare and so, with what was called the ‘Destroyers for Bases Agreement’, the British swapped their ability to be a global power for help in remaining in the war. Almost every British naval base in the Western Hemisphere was handed over.

In 1949 Washington led the formation of NATO and with it effectively assumed command of the Western world’s surviving military might. The civilian head of NATO might well be a Belgian one year, a Brit the next, but the military commander is always an American, and by far the greatest firepower within NATO is American.

No matter what the treaty says, NATO’s Supreme Commander ultimately answers to Washington. The UK and France would learn to their cost during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when they were compelled by American pressure to cease their occupation of the canal zone, losing most of their influence in the Middle East as a result, that a NATO country does not hold a strategic naval policy without first asking Washington.

In 2013 the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron visited Tripoli and told the Libyan people that the lesson learned in Afghanistan and Iraq was: ‘helping other counties, intervening in other countries, is not simply about military intervention.’ To cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ he pledged: ‘In building a new Libya you will have no greater friend than the United Kingdom. We will stand with you every step of the way.’ But then, as the country plunged into chaos, with numerous militia battling for control, the Europeans walked away, leaving a broken state, a desperate people and a new route opening up for illegal immigration into the continent.

President Trump has made overtures to Moscow and sought a personal relationship with Putin, but the differences between the two countries are greater than the bond between their leaders.

The concrete costs a lot. Not just to mix and pour, but to be allowed to mix and pour it where you want to.

Equally, when North Korea fires at South Korea, the south fires back, but currently the US does not. Instead it puts forces on alert in a public manner to send a signal. If the situation escalated it would then fire warning shots at a North Korean target, and finally, direct shots. It’s a way of escalating without declaring war – and this is when things get dangerous.

So when challenged, each side must react, because for each challenge it ducks, its allies’ confidence, and competitors’ fear, slowly drains away until eventually there is an event which persuades a state to switch sides.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim of 1900, which has now entered the political lexicon: ‘Speak softly, but carry a big stick.’

The Cuban Missile Crisis is generally considered an American victory; what is less publicised is that several months after Russia removed its missiles from Cuba, the United States removed its Jupiter missiles (which could reach Moscow) from Turkey. It was actually a compromise, with both sides, eventually, able to tell their respective publics that they had not capitulated.

Washington now watches each construction project, and flight, and has to pick and choose when and where it makes more vigorous protests, or sends naval and air force patrols near the disputed territory. Somehow it must reassure its allies that it will stand by them and guarantee freedom of navigation in international areas, whilst simultaneously not going so far as to draw China into a military confrontation.

The Americans will assist the Japanese Self Defence Force to be a robust body, but simultaneously restrict Japan’s military ability to challenge the US in the Pacific.

While all the other countries in the region matter, in what is a complicated diplomatic jigsaw puzzle, the key states look to be Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. These three sit astride the Strait of Malacca, which at its narrowest is only 1.7 miles across. Every day through that strait come 12 million barrels of oil heading for an increasingly thirsty China and elsewhere in the region. As long as these three countries are pro-American, the Americans have a key advantage.

On the plus side, the Chinese are not politically ideological, they do not seek to spread Communism, nor do they covet (much) more territory in the way the Russians did during the Cold War, and neither side is looking for conflict. The Chinese can accept America guarding most of the sea lanes which deliver Chinese goods to the world, so long as the Americans accept that there will be limits to just how close to China that control extends. There will be arguments, and nationalism will be used to ensure the unity of the Chines...

Elsewhere in the Middle East, US policy in the short term is to prevent Iran from becoming too strong whilst at the same time reaching for what is known as the ‘grand bargain’ – an agreement settling the many issues which divide the two countries, and ending three and a half decades of enmity. The Trump Presidency inherited this policy, and agrees with it, but seeks to achieve it via a more aggressive route.

The close relationship with Israel may cool, albeit slowly, as the demographics of the USA change. The children of the Hispanic and Asian immigrants now arriving in the United States will be more interested in Latin America and the Far East than in a tiny country on the edge of a region no longer vital to American interests. It’s possible the Trump–Netanyahu love-in may be the high point of this relationship.

America’s experiment with nation-building overseas appears to be over. In Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the USA underestimated the mentality and strength of small powers and of tribes. The Americans’ own history of physical security and unity may have led them to overestimate the power of their democratic rationalist argument, which believes that compromise, hard work and even voting would triumph over atavistic, deep-seated historical fears of ‘the other’, be they Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Arab, Muslim or Christian. They assumed people would want to come together whereas in fact many dare not try and would prefer to live apart because of their experiences. It is a sad reflection upon humanity, but it appears throughout many periods of history, and in many places, to be an unfortunate truth. The American actions took the lid off a simmering pot which had temporarily hidden that truth. This does not make American policymakers ‘naive’, as some of the snootier European diplomats like to believe; but they do have a ‘can do’ and a ‘can fix’ attitude which inevitably will not always work.

The moral stature of the USA as the leader of the free world, and indeed the presidency, may have been damaged but that is more down to the ugly belligerence of Trump rather than the massive and sudden complete reversal of decades of policy. Trump plays with fire and risks the world burning, especially with his loose talk about not necessarily guaranteeing NATO’s policy that ‘an attack on one member state is an attack on all of them’, but how much fundamentally has changed? Yes, he’s pulled out of arms treaties with Russia regarding Europe, but he’s engaged in arms reduction talks on the nuclear issue. The ‘pivot to China’ had begun already, as had the loosening of ties with Europe. In the Middle East the USA has only ever focused when it thought its interests might be harmed – hence Obama’s casual treatment of the Syria crisis. Even the tearing up of the Iran nuclear deal is not a revolutionary change in American foreign policy but a return to their previous harder line.

Put simply, at the personal level, the arrival of Mr Trump is new and may be part of the cheapening of political dialogue in a new age of populist leaders, but at the strategic level, the USA is behaving now as the USA has behaved before.

For thirty years it has been fashionable to predict the imminent or ongoing decline of the USA. This is as wrong now as it was in the past. The planet’s most successful country is about to become self-sufficient in energy, it remains the pre-eminent economic power and it spends more on research and development for its military than the overall military budget of all the other NATO countries combined.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, in a double-edged remark, said more than a century ago that ‘God takes special care of drunks, children and the United States of America.’ It appears still to be true.

‘Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories.’ Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War and a Ruined House in France

Western Europe has no real deserts, the frozen wastes are confined to a few areas in the far north, and earthquakes, volcanoes and massive flooding are rare. The rivers are long, flat, navigable and made for trade. As they empty into a variety of seas and oceans they flow into coastlines which are, west, north and south, abundant in natural harbours.

Europe’s major rivers do not meet (unless you count the Sava, which drains into the Danube in Belgrade). This partly explains why there are so many countries in what is a relatively small space. Because they do not connect, most of the rivers act, at some point, as boundaries, and each is a sphere of economic influence in its own right; this gave rise to at least one major urban development on the banks of each river, some of which in turn became capital cities.

There are also unprovable theories that the domination of Catholicism in the south has held it back, whereas the Protestant work ethic propelled the northern countries to greater heights. Each time I visit the Bavarian city of Munich I reflect on this theory, and while driving past the gleaming temples of the headquarters of BMW, Allianz and Siemens have cause to doubt it. In Germany 34 per cent of the population is Catholic, and Bavaria itself is predominantly Catholic, yet their religious predilections do not appear to have influenced either their progress or their insistence that Greeks should work harder and pay more taxes.

It is reliant on the Aegean Sea for access to maritime trade in the region – but across that sea lies Turkey, a large potential enemy. Greece fought several wars against Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in modern times still spends a vast amount of euros, which

The mainland is protected by mountains, but there are about 1,400 Greek islands (6,000 if you include various rocks sticking out of the Aegean) of which about 200 are inhabited. It takes a decent navy just to patrol this territory, never mind one strong enough to deter any attempt to take them over. The result is a huge cost in military spending that Greece cannot afford.

Relations with Britain, as a counterweight to Germany within the EU, came easily despite the betrayal of 1939: Britain and France had signed a treaty guaranteeing to come to Poland’s aid if Germany invaded. When the attack came the response to the Blitzkrieg was a ‘Sitzkrieg’ – both Allies sat behind the Maginot Line in France as Poland was swallowed up. Despite this, relations with the UK are strong, even if the main ally the newly liberated Poland sought out in 1989 was the USA.