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

by Tim Marshall

The landscape imprisons their leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to maneuver than you might think.

It has shaped the wars, the power, politics, and social development of the peoples that now inhabit nearly every part of the earth.

The physical realities that underpin national and international politics are too often disregarded in both writing about history and in contemporary reporting of world affairs.

Because between them is the highest mountain range in the world, and it is practically impossible to advance large military columns through or over the Himalayas.

The river became the de facto border of what some countries now recognize as the independent state of Kosovo.

In truth, the restraints of both geography and politics meant the NATO leaders never really had that option.

For example, in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, I saw a demonstration of how, even with today’s modern technology, climate still dictates the military possibilities of even the world’s most powerful armies.

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

I could now see its strategic importance and understand how political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities.

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

The colonial powers used ink to draw lines that bore no relation to the physical realities of the region, and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen.

Japan is an island nation devoid of natural resources, while the division of the Koreas is a problem still waiting to be solved.

For most of history, humans have ignored it, but in the twentieth century we found energy there, and twenty-first-century diplomacy will determine who owns—and sells—that resource.

Any sensible person can see that technology is now bending the iron rules of geography.

But geography, and the history of how nations have established themselves within that geography, remains crucial to our understanding of the world today and to our future.

power is hard to defend, and so for centuries its leaders have compensated by pushing outward.

“but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

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.”

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.

the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.

He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as a “major geopolitical disaster of the century.”

Russia is twice the size of the United States or China, five times the size of India, seventy times the size of the UK.

Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones that Moscow governs.

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

Russia was effectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation—for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus—still feel this way.

Moscow controlled that space in order to prevent anyone else from doing so.

it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power.

Afghanistan is the “Graveyard of Empires.”

“approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India.

When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fifteen countries.

Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets, and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one where mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas delineate where people live, how they are separated from each other and, thus, how they developed different languages and customs.

those that are neutral, the pro-Western group, and the pro-Russian camp.

energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade.

many are among the states that suffered most under Soviet tyranny. 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.

That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating.

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For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership in the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership in NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red line.

The Germans and Americans had backed the opposition parties, with Berlin in particular seeing former world boxing champion turned politician Vitali Klitschko as their man.

Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, nor even pro-Russian—Putin knew the situation had to change.

When faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force.

geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century and that Russia does not play by the rule of law.

ethnic Russians inside Ukraine needed to be protected.

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.

Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter.

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.

He had revived the geographic title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century.

Several million ethnic Russians still remain inside what was the USSR but outside Russia.

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.

military action cannot be ruled out.