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

by Tim Marshall

Broadly speaking, geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors: not just the physical landscape—the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example—but also climate, demographics, cultural regions, and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an important impact on many different aspects of our civilization, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade, and religion.

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. The conflict in Iraq and Syria is rooted in colonial powers ignoring the rules of geography, whereas the Chinese occupation of Tibet is rooted in obeying them. America’s global foreign policy is dictated by them, and even the power projection of the last superpower standing can only mitigate the rules that nature, or God, handed down. What are those rules? The place to begin is in the land where power is hard to defend, and so for centuries its leaders have compensated by pushing outward. It is the land without mountains to its west: Russia.

When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends “but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, “I am convinced that 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.”

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

The birthplace of Chinese civilization is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain.

If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.” China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.

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, at the least, that the extended family comes before the individual.

The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Appalachians, 1,500 miles long, are impressive, but compared to the Rockies not particularly high. Nevertheless, they still formed a formidable barrier to westward movement for the early settlers, who were busy consolidating what territory they had subdued and preparing to govern it themselves. The colonists had another barrier, this one political. The British government forbade settlement west of the Appalachians, as it wanted to ensure that trade, and taxes, remained on the Eastern Seaboard.

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

The Americans now had strategic geographical depth, a massive fertile land, and an alternative to the Atlantic ports with which to conduct business. They also had ever-expanding routes east to west linking the East Coast to the new territory, and then the river systems flowing north to south to connect the then sparsely populated lands with one another, thus encouraging America to form as a single entity.

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?

the opening of the transcontinental railroad. Now you could cross the country in a week, whereas it had previously taken several hazardous months.

For most of the nineteenth century, foreign policy was dominated by expanding trade and avoiding entanglements outside the neighborhood, but it was time to push out and protect the approaches to the coastlines.

In 1898 that threat was removed by war with Spain.

R12308181632 Here Marshall fails to mention that this war was not fought in the American continent mainly, and instead in Asia--particularly the Philippines. Also, most sources say that it was essentially a 'mock war'.

Most analysis written over the past decade assumes that by the middle of the twenty-first century China will overtake the United States and become the leading superpower. For reasons partially discussed in chapter two, I am not convinced. It may take a century.

American assistance to other governments is not always entirely altruistic.

America’s treaty with Taiwan states if the Chinese invade what they regard as their 23rd province, the United States will go to war. A red line for China, which could spark an invasion, is formal recognition of Taiwan by the United States, or a declaration of independence by Taiwan.

the rise of Brazil in case it gets any ideas about its influence in the Caribbean Sea.

America’s experiment with nation building overseas appears to be over.

and it spends more on research and development for its military than the overall military budget of all the other NATO countries combined.

R12308181733 This is true. While many may dismiss it as speculative or entertaining, the recent hearings on UAPs or UFOs simultaneously draw attention to US military capability (specifically aircraft) due to the air of confidentiality exhibited by the most prominent whisteblower.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, in a double-edged remark, said more than a century ago that “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”

France is the only European country to be both a northern and southern power. It contains the largest expanse of fertile land in Western Europe,

Union of Southern Slavs, otherwise known as Yugoslavia.

Bismarck famously said that a major war would be sparked by “some damned fool thing in the Balkans”;

R12308181805 Because tensions flew through the roof

Finland

R12308181807 They joined April this year, but the circumstances had been complex, and remain so, which might be why we haven't yet seen anything drastic from Moscow.

the “idea” of Germany for centuries: the Eastern Frankish lands, which became the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century, were sometimes called “the Germanies,” comprising as they did up to five hundred Germanic mini-kingdoms.

The dilemma of Germany’s geographical position and belligerence became known as “the German Question.” The answer, after the horrors of the Second World War, indeed after centuries of war, was the acceptance of the presence in the European lands of a single overwhelming power, the United States, which set up NATO and allowed for the eventual creation of the European Union.

Seen through the prism of seven decades of peace, this may seem alarmist, and Germany is among the most peaceful and democratic members of the European family; but seen through the prism of seven centuries of European warfare, it cannot be ruled out.

Its most serious diplomatic foray into a noneconomic crisis has been in Ukraine,

R12308190356 Repeated last year.

Prejudice against immigrants always rises during times of economic recession such as recently suffered in Europe,

both a physical and conceptual attack on “ever closer union.”

the rules of paradise

R12309071603 belle epoque?

Africa is far, far longer than usually portrayed, which explains what an achievement it was to round the Cape of Good Hope, and is a reminder of the importance of the Suez Canal to world trade.

The geography of this immense continent can be explained in several ways, but the most basic is to think of Africa in terms of the top third and bottom two-thirds.

R12308190910 North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa

colonialism forced those differences to be resolved within an artificial structure—the European concept of a nation state.

the Congo wars are also known as “Africa’s world war.”

The European colonialists created an egg without a chicken, a logical absurdity repeated across the continent and one that continues to haunt it.

The Blue Nile, which begins in Ethiopia, and the White Nile meet in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, before flowing through the Nubian Desert and into Egypt.

In 2011, Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the dam could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.

Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch.

R12308191318 Echoed by CaspianReport

Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producer of oil, and all of this high-quality oil is in the south.

By size, population, and natural resources, Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country. It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 177 million people, which, with its size and natural resources, makes it the leading regional power.

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north.

Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles, while its opponents would become anti-Communist.

Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.

Washington, DC, is also conscious that it now plays second fiddle to China in business terms across the continent.

There is a new scramble for Africa in this century, but this time it is two-pronged. There are the well-publicized outside interests, and meddling, in the competition for resources, but there is also the “scramble within” and South Africa intends to scramble fastest and farthest.

Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world,