Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1)

by Tim Marshall

The land on which we live has always shaped us. It has shaped the wars, the power, politics, and social development of the peoples that now inhabit nearly every part of the earth.

geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors:

In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defense 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 defense and mutual aid.

Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there.

There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

China may well eventually control parts of Siberia in the long run, but this would be through Russia’s declining birthrate and Chinese immigration moving north.

When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow,

the plains of Kandahar and the mountains of the Hindu Kush proved the rule that Afghanistan is the “Graveyard of Empires.”

The exception 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.

Add to these Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, who would all like to join both organizations 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. NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war.

It called NATO’s positioning of troops and hardware closer to its borders “inadmissible,” which was just short of fighting talk. To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the United States encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its fleet in the Black Sea while relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus.

“Diplomacy for Beginners”: When faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force.

they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence.

No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbors knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, and Washington, DC, is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, but the West could.

Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years,

It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev’s infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO.

Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor elsewhere. Unless it feels threatened, Russia will probably not send its troops all the way into the Baltic States, or any farther forward than it already is in Georgia; but it will push its power in Georgia, and in this volatile period further military action cannot be ruled out.

the signal was clear—NATO is prepared to fight. Indeed it would have to, because if it failed to react to an attack on a member state, it would instantly be obsolete.

The Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics can be stirred up to making life difficult. There are existing, fully formed political parties already representing many of them. Russia also controls the central heating in the homes of the Baltic people. It can set the price people pay for their heating bills each month, and, if it chooses, simply turn the heating off.

Stalin, in his wisdom, settled large numbers of Russians there, just as he had in Crimea after deporting much of the Tatar population.

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

Russia’s most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil.

This is an economic battle based on geography and one of the modern examples where technology is being utilized in an attempt to beat the geographic restraints of earlier eras.

China is a civilization pretending to be a nation. —Lucian Pye, political scientist

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 civilized China and the “barbarous” regions that surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people.

This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so.

Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.”

When Westerners, be they Mr. Gere or President Obama, talk about Tibet, the Chinese find it deeply irritating. Not dangerous, not subversive—just irritating. They see it not through the prism of human rights, but that of geopolitical security, and can only believe that the Westerners are trying to undermine their security.

Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual.

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

At stake here is the concept of international waters and free passage in peacetime; it is not something that will easily be given up by the other powers.

At this point the fledgling United States was far from secure, and if it had been restricted to its then boundaries it would have struggled to become a great power.

In 1803, the United States simply bought control of the entire Louisiana Territory from France. The land stretched from the Gulf of Mexico northwest up to the headwaters of the tributaries of the Mississippi River in the Rocky Mountains. It was an area equivalent in size to modern-day Spain, Italy, France, the UK, and Germany combined. With it came the Mississippi basin, from which flowed America’s route to greatness.

the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the United States and gave it mastery over the greatest inland water transport route in the world.

The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together.

most Americans thought the great victory of 1819 was getting Florida, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: “The acquisition of a definite line of boundary to the [Pacific] forms a great epoch in our history.”

Washington, DC, issued the Monroe Doctrine (named after President James Monroe) in 1823, which boiled down to warning the European powers that they could no longer seek land in the Western Hemisphere, and that if they lost any parts of their existing territory they could not reclaim them.

The territory went on to join the Union in 1845 and together they fought the 1846–48 Mexican War, in which they crushed their southern neighbor, which was required to accept that Mexico ended in the sands of the southern bank of the Rio Grande.

However, in the twenty-first century, in the southwest the cultural historical memory of the region as Hispanic land is likely to resurface, as the demographics are changing rapidly and Hispanics will be the majority population within a few decades.

The Homestead Act of 1862 awarded 160 acres of federally owned land to anyone who farmed it for five years and paid a small fee. If you were a poor man from Germany, Scandinavia, or Italy, why go to Latin America and be a serf, when you could go to the United States and be a free land-owning man?

In 1867, Alaska was bought from Russia. At the time it was known as “Seward’s Folly,” named for the secretary of state, William Seward, who agreed to the deal. He paid $7.2 million, or two cents, an acre. The press accused him of purchasing snow, but minds were changed with the discovery of gold in 1896. Decades later, huge reserves of oil were also found.

in 1869, came the opening of the transcontin...

Cuba in particular kept American presidents awake at night, as it would again in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The island sits just off Florida, giving it access to and potential control of the Straits of Florida and the Yucatán Channel in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exit and entry route for the port of New Orleans.

It also annexed the Pacific island of Hawaii, thus protecting the approaches to its own West Coast.

In 1949, Washington led the formation of NATO and with it effectively assumed command of the Western world’s surviving military might.

There were now two maps of the United States. The familiar one stretching diagonally down from Seattle on the Pacific coast to the panhandle in the Sargasso Sea, and the part real/part conceptual one of America’s geopolitical-power footprint.

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

the history of the twenty-first century will be written in Asia and the Pacific. Half of the world’s population lives there, and if India is included it is expected to account for half of the global economic output by 2050.

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 that persuades a state to switch sides.

The deadly game in this century will be how the Chinese, Americans, and others in the region manage each crisis that arises without losing face and without building up a deep well of resentment and anger on both sides. The Cuban Missile Crisis is generally considered an American victory; what is less publicized 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.