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

by Tim Marshall

Turkey is determined to be at the crossroads of history even if the traffic can at times be hazardous.

A joke quickly spread around the city about four things people can’t choose in life: place of birth, race, ethnicity and the mayor of Istanbul. The dark humour disguised both the unease and rage many people felt about the president’s increasing authoritarianism.

Modern Pakistan and India were born in fire; next time the fire could kill them.

Bangladesh’s problem is not that it lacks access to the sea, but that the sea has too much access to Bangladesh: flooding from the waters of the Bay of Bengal constantly afflicts the low-lying territory.

Different powers have invaded the subcontinent over the centuries, but none have ever truly conquered it. Even now New Delhi does not truly control India and, as we shall see, to an even greater extent Islamabad does not control Pakistan.

What did Pakistan get out of this? Much less than India. It inherited India’s most troublesome border, the North West Frontier with Afghanistan, and it was a state split into two non-contiguous regions with little to hold it together as 1,000 miles of Indian territory separated West Pakistan from East Pakistan.

However, back in 1947, twenty-five years after the end of the Ottoman Empire, Jinnah and the other leaders of the new Pakistan, amid much fanfare and promises of a bright future, claimed they had created a united Muslim homeland.

Pakistan is geographically, economically, demographically and militarily weaker than India. Its national identity is also not as strong. India, despite its size, cultural diversity, and secessionist movements, has built a solid secular democracy with a unified sense of Indian identity. Pakistan is an Islamic state with a history of dictatorship and populations whose loyalty is often more to their cultural region than to the state.

Secular democracy has served India well, but the 1947 division did give it a head start. Within the new borders of India was the vast majority of the subcontinent’s industry, most of the taxable income base and the majority of the major cities. For example Calcutta, with its port and banking sector, went to India, thus depr...

From these five distinct regions, each with their own language, one state was formed, but not a nation. Pakistan tries hard to create a sense of unity, but it remains rare for a Punjabi to marry a Baluch, or a Sindhi to marry a Pashtun. The Punjabis comprise 60 per cent of the population, the Sindhis 14 per cent, Pashtuns 13.5 per cent and Baluchs 4.5 per cent. Religious tensions are ever present – not only in the antagonism sometimes shown to the country’s Christian and Hindu minorities, but also between the majority Sunni and the minority Shia Muslims. In Pakistan there are several nations within one state.

Islam, cricket, the intelligence services, the military and fear of India are what hold Pakistan together.

The relationship between India and Pakistan will never be friendly, but were it not for the thorn of Kashmir in both sides it could potentially be cordial.

To thwart each other, each side seeks to mould the government of Afghanistan to its liking – or, to put it another way, each side wants Kabul to be an enemy of its enemy.

The Afghan–Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line. Sir Mortimer Durand, the Foreign Secretary of the colonial government of India, drew it in 1893 and the then ruler of Afghanistan agreed to it. However, in 1949 the Afghan government ‘annulled’ the agreement, believing it to be an artificial relic of the colonial era. Since then Pakistan has tried to persuade Afghanistan to change its mind, Afghanistan refuses, and the Pashtuns each side of the mountains try to carry on as they have for centuries by ignoring the border and maintaining their ancient connections.

‘If you didn’t know he was there you were incompetent; if you did you were complicit.’

This was always understood and accepted by Islamabad. The Pakistani government pretended it ruled the entire country, and the Pashtun of the North West Frontier pretended they were loyal to the Pakistani state. This relationship worked until 11 September 2001.

In this it has a new ally, albeit one it keeps at arm’s length – the United States. For decades India was suspicious that the Americans were the new British, but with a different accent and more money. In the twenty-first century a more confident India, in an increasingly multipolar world, has found reason to co-operate with the USA.

North Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River. The USA, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost 30,000 troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.

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. North Korea puts a lot of effort into playing all outsiders off against each other, including the Chinese, in order to block a united front against it.

North Korea is a stain on the world’s conscience, and yet few people know the full scale of the horrors taking place there.

A former ambassador to Pyongyang once told me: ‘It’s like you are on one side of the glass, and you try to prise it open, but there’s nothing to get a grip on to peer inside.’

Kim Jong-il was described by the Pyongyang propaganda machine as ‘Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have’, ‘Guiding Sun Ray’, ‘Shining Star of Paektu Mountain’, ‘World Leader of the twenty-first century’ and ‘Great Man who descended from heaven’, as well as ‘Eternal Bosom of Hot Love’. His father had very similar titles, as does his son.

How does the general population feel about such statements? Even the experts are left guessing. When you look at footage of the mass hysteria of North Koreans mourning Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011, it’s interesting to note that after the first few rows of sobbing, shrieking people the level of grief appears to diminish. Is this because those at the front know the camera is on them and thus for their own safety they must do what is required? Or have the Party faithful been put at the front? Or are they ordinary people who are genuinely grief-stricken, a North Korean magnification of the sort of emotional outbursts we saw in the UK after the death of Princess Diana?

In the twentieth century the Japanese were back, annexing the whole country in 1910, and later set about destroying its culture. The Korean language was banned, as was the teaching of Korean history, and worship at Shinto shrines became compulsory. The decades of repression have left a legacy which even today impacts on relations between Japan and both the Korean states.

The North Korean leadership, and its Chinese backers, had correctly worked out that, in a strictly military sense, Korea was not vital to the USA; but what they failed to understand was that the Americans knew that if they didn’t stand up for their South Korean ally, their other allies around the world would lose confidence in them. If America’s allies, at the height of the Cold War, began to hedge their bets or go over to the Communist side, then its entire global strategy would be in trouble. 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.

A major concern for South Korea is how close Seoul and the surrounding urban areas are to the border with North Korea. Seoul’s position makes it vulnerable to surprise attacks from its neighbour, whose capital is much further away and partially protected by mountainous terrain.

Two experts on North Korea, Victor Cha and David Chang, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, estimated that the DPRK forces could fire up to 500,000 rounds towards the city in the first hour of a conflict. That seems a very high estimate, but even if you divide it by five the results would still be devastating. The South Korean government would find itself fighting a major war whilst simultaneously trying to manage the chaos of millions of people fleeing south even as it tried to reinforce the border with troops stationed below the capital.

A full-scale conflict now might be even more catastrophic. The ROK’s economy is eighty times stronger than the North’s, its population is twice the size and the combined South Korean and US armed forces would almost certainly overwhelm North Korea eventually, assuming China did not decide to join in again.

most of the economic costs of reunification will be borne by South Korea, and they will dwarf those of German reunification. East Germany may have been lagging far behind West Germany, but it had a history of development, an industrial base and an educated population. Developing the north of Korea would be building from ground zero and the costs would hold back the economy of a united peninsula for a decade. After that the benefits of the rich natural resources of the north, such as coal, zinc, copper, iron and rare earth elements, and the modernisation programme would be expected to kick in, but there are mixed feelings about risking the prosperity of one of the world’s most advanced nations in the meantime.

Japan considered Korea to be, in the words of its Prussian military advisor, Major Klemens Meckel, ‘A dagger pointed at the heart of Japan’. Controlling the peninsula removed the threat, and controlling Manchuria made sure the hand of China, and to a lesser extent Russia, could not get near the dagger’s handle. Korea’s coal and iron ore would also come in handy.

But by the early 1980s the faint stirrings of nationalism could again be detected. 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.

Why cultural uprisings happen ?

In the spring of 2015 Tokyo also unveiled what it called a ‘helicopter-carrying destroyer’. It didn’t take a military expert to notice that the vessel was as big as the Japanese aircraft carriers of the Second World War, which are forbidden by the surrender terms of 1945. The ship can be adapted for fixed-wing aircraft but the defence minister issued a statement saying that he was ‘not thinking of using it as an aircraft carrier’. This is akin to buying a motorbike then saying that because you were not going to use it as a motorbike, it is a pushbike. The Japanese now have an aircraft carrier.

China’s expanded ‘Air Defence Identification Zone’ in the East China Sea covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. When Beijing said that any plane flying through the zone must identity itself or ‘face defensive measures’, Japan, South Korea and the United States responded by flying through it without doing so. There was no hostile response from China, but this is an issue that can be turned into an ultimatum at a time of Beijing’s choosing.

Japanese statisticians fear that the population will shrink to under 100 million by the middle of the century. If the current birth rate continues, it is even possible that by 2110 the population will have fallen below the 50 million it was in 1910. Japanese governments are trying a variety of measures to reverse the decline. A recent example is using millions of dollars of tax payers’ money to fund a matchmaking service for young couples. Subsidised konkatsu parties are arranged for single men and women to meet, eat, drink and – eventually – have babies.

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

‘We like to be called the “continent of hope” . . . This hope is like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always put off.’ Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and Nobel laureate

LATIN AMERICA, PARTICULARLY ITS SOUTH, IS PROOF that you can bring the Old World’s knowledge and technology to the new, but if geography is against you, then you will have limited success, especially if you get the politics wrong.

Another border dispute dating back to the nineteenth century is indicated by the borders of the British territory of Belize and neighbouring Guatemala. They are straight lines, such as we have seen in Africa and the Middle East, and they were drawn by the British. Guatemala claims Belize as part of its sovereign territory but, unlike Bolivia, is unwilling to push the issue. Chile and Argentina argue over the Beagle Channel water route, Venezuela claims half of Guyana, and Ecuador has historical claims on Peru. This last example is one of the more serious land disputes on the continent and has led to three border wars over the past seventy-five years, the most recent being in 1995; but again, the growth of democracy has eased tensions.

South America is in effect a demographically hollow continent and its coastline is often referred to as the ‘populated rim’.

In its far north Mexico has a 2,000-mile-long border with the USA, almost all of which is desert. The land here is so harsh that most of it is uninhabited. This acts as a buffer zone between it and its giant northern neighbour – but a buffer that is more advantageous to the Americans than the Mexicans due to the disparity in their technology. Militarily, only US forces could stage a major invasion across it; any force coming the other way would be destroyed. As a barrier to illegal entry into the USA it is useful, but porous – a problem with which successive US administrations will have to deal.

Mexico is destined to live in the USA’s shadow and as such will always play the subservient role in bilateral relations.

Here lies a conundrum. Mexico makes its living by supplying consumer goods to America, and as long as Americans consume drugs, Mexicans will supply them – after all, the idea here is to make things which are cheap to produce and sell them at prices higher than those in legal trade. Without drugs the country would be even poorer than it is, as a vast amount of foreign money would be cut off. With drugs, it is even more violent than it would otherwise be. The same is true of some of the countries to Mexico’s south.

Given that the Panama Canal a few hundred miles to the south is being widened, sceptics ask why the Nicaraguan version was ever thought necessary and if it could ever be profitable, but the whole project appears to have been at least as much about the national interests of China as about commercial profit.

In a speech in 1904 Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt said: ‘In the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of [such] wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.’

‘There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real.’ Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Arctic in Fact and Fable

The first recorded expedition was in 330 BCE by a Greek mariner called Pytheas of Massilia, who found a strange land called ‘Thule’. Back home in the Mediterranean, few believed his startling tales of pure white landscapes, frozen seas and strange creatures including great white bears; but Pytheas was just the first of many people over the centuries to record the wonder of the Arctic and to succumb to the emotions it evokes.

The melting of the ice cap already allows cargo ships to make the journey through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian archipelago for several summer weeks a year, thus cutting at least a week from the transit time from Europe to China. The first cargo ship not to be escorted by an icebreaker went through in 2014. The Nunavik carried 23,000 tons of nickel ore from Canada to China. The polar route was 40 per cent shorter and used deeper waters than if it had gone through the Panama Canal.

There currently are at least nine legal disputes and claims over sovereignty in the Arctic Ocean, all legally complicated, and some with the potential to cause serious tensions between the nations. One of the most brazen comes from the Russians: Moscow has already put a marker down – a long way down. 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’.

Despite Russia’s shrinking economic power, resulting in budget cuts in many government departments, its defence budget has increased and this is partially to pay for the boost in Arctic military muscle taking place between now and 2020.

In a speech to the Swedish Atlantic Council, Iceland’s Justice Minister Björn Bjarnason said: ‘A certain military presence should be maintained in the region, sending a signal about a nation’s interests and ambitions in a given area, since a military vacuum could be misinterpreted as a lack of national interest and priority.’