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

by Tim Marshall

Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was never more than a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power.

Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea, and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 84 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day.

Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch. Another hotly contested liquid is oil.

Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system.

Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology.

About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which—along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries—means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up.

Kenya’s economy is the powerhouse in the five-nation East African Community, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the region’s GDP. It may have less arable land than Tanzania, but it uses what it has much more efficiently. Its industrial system is also more efficient, as is its system of getting goods to market—both domestic and international.

China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.

In Luanda, the CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment buildings built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.

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. For example, China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner, which goes some way to explaining why China consistently protects Sudan at the UN Security Council and continued to back its President Omar al-Bashir even when there was an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court.

South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth. South Africa’s economy is ranked second-largest on the continent, behind Nigeria. It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military, and population (53 million). South Africa is more developed than many African nations, thanks to its location at the very southern tip of the continent with access to two oceans; its natural wealth of gold, silver, and coal; and a climate and land that allow for large-scale food production.

Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into highland, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there.

In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.

The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.

After the First World War, there were fewer borders in the wider Middle East than currently exist, and those that did exist were usually determined by geography alone. The spaces within them were loosely subdivided and governed according to geography, ethnicity, and religion, but there was no attempt to create nation states.

It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” (Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, including the Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature that not only the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that, until European colonization, most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders.

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries. The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was ruled from Istanbul. At its height, it stretched from the gates of Vienna, across Anatolia, and down through Arabia to the Indian Ocean. From west to east it took in what are now Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and parts of Iran. It had never bothered to make up names for most of these regions; in 1867 it simply divided them into administrative areas known as Vilayets, which were usually based on where certain tribes lived, be they the Kurds in present-day northern Iraq, or the tribal federations in what is now part of Syria and part of Iraq.

In 1916, the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a grease pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the northeast. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south

there was violence and extremism before the Europeans arrived. Nevertheless, as we saw in Africa, arbitrarily creating “nation states” out of people unused to living together in one region is not a recipe for justice, equality, and stability.

Prior to Sykes-Picot (in its wider sense), there was no state of Syria, no Lebanon, nor were there Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel, or Palestine.

Islam is the dominant religion of the Middle East but contains within it many different versions. The most important division within Islam is almost as old as the religion itself: the split between Sunni and Shia Muslims dates back to 632 CE, when the prophet Muhammad died, leading to a dispute over his succession.

There are also divisions within the division. For example, there are various branches of Sunni Islam that follow particular great scholars from the past, including the strict Hanbali tradition, named after the ninth-century Iraqi scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal, favored by many Sunnis from Qatar and Saudi Arabia; this in turn has influenced the ultra-puritanical Salafi thought, which predominates among jihadists.

Shia Islam has three main divisions, the best known of which is probably the Twelvers, who adhere to the teaching of the twelve imams, but even that contains divisions. The Ismaili school disputes the lineage of the seventh imam, while the Zaidi school disputes that of the fifth imam. There are also several offshoots from mainstream Shia Islam, with the Alawites and Druze being considered so far away from traditional Islamic thought that many other Muslims, especially among the Sunni, do not even recognize them as being part of the religion.

During the eight-stage campaign, Saddam’s forces took no prisoners and killed all males between the ages of fifteen and fifty whom they came across. Up to one hundred thousand Kurds were murdered and 90 percent of their villages wiped off the map.

Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families. Syria’s Kurds are trying to create a statelet they call Rojava. They see it as part of a future, greater Kurdistan, but in the event of its creation, questions would arise as to who would have how much power, and where.

Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular that London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately, both were promised the same thing—control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saudi and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted off the maps, drew some lines, and said the head of the Saudi family could rule over one region and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would “need” a British diplomat to keep an eye on things.

The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born.

Lebanon appears to be a unified state only from the perspective of seeing it on a map. It takes just a few minutes after arriving at Beirut Airport to discover it is far from that.

Syria is another multi-faith, multi-confessional, multi-tribal state that fell apart at the first time of asking. Typical of the region, the country is majority Sunni Muslim—about 70 percent—but has substantial minorities of other faiths.

When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time, the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility toward them that they rebranded themselves as Alawites, as in “followers of Ali” to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society. The French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where, over the years, they established themselves as a major power in the land.

The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, which comprises approximately 12 percent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970.

Groups such as al-Qaeda and, more recently, the Islamic State have garnered what support they have partially because of the humiliation caused by colonialism and then the failure of pan-Arab nationalism—and to an extent the Arab nation state. Arab leaders have failed to deliver prosperity or freedom, and the siren call of Islamism, which promises to solve all problems, has proved attractive to many in a region marked by a toxic mix of piety, unemployment, and repression.

The United States houses its growing fleet of drones on at least ten bases around the world. This allows it to hit targets via a joystick operated by a person sitting in an air-conditioned office in Nevada, or transfer control to an operative near the target. But it also means the United States needs to keep good relations with whichever country it receives permission from to house the regional drone HQ. This is a reminder of the conceptual map of US power required to fully understand geopolitics today. For example, the signal sent from Nevada may need to travel through an underwater cable to Germany and then be sent up to a satellite belonging to a third country that sells bandwidth to the Pentagon.

the oil is mostly in the Kurdish and Shia areas; and if there is no strong, unified Iraq then the oil money flows back to where the oil is found. The Kurdish lands cannot be brought under their control, the cities south of Baghdad such as Najaf and Karbala are overwhelmingly Shia, and the ports of Basra and Umm Qasr are far away from the Sunni territory.

Many of the international jihadists who survive will return home to Europe, North America, Indonesia, the Caucasus, and Bangladesh, where they are unlikely to settle for a quiet life.

The Palestinians are very aware that most of the Arab countries, to which some of them fled in the twentieth century, refuse to give them citizenship; they insist that the status of their children and grandchildren remains “refugee,” and work to ensure that they do not integrate into the country.

The Gaza Strip is by far the worse off of the two current Palestinian “entities.” It is only 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide. Crammed into this space are 1.8 million people. It is in effect a “city state,” albeit a horribly impoverished one.

The West Bank is almost seven times the size of Gaza but is landlocked. Much of it comprises a mountain ridge that runs north to south. From a military perspective, this gives an advantage to whoever controls the high ground of the coastal plain on the western side of the ridge and the Jordan Rift Valley to its east.

from a military perspective the Israeli view is that a non-Israeli force cannot be allowed to control these heights, as heavy weapons could be fired onto the coastal plain, where 70 percent of Israel’s population lives.

Because Israel is so small it has no real “strategic depth,” nowhere to fall back to if its defenses are breached, and so militarily it concentrates on trying to ensure that no one can get near it.

Israel faces threats to its security and to the lives of its citizens by terrorist attacks and rocket fire from its immediate neighbors, but not a threat to its very existence. Egypt, to the southwest, is not a threat. There is a peace treaty that currently suits both sides, and the partially demilitarized Sinai Peninsula acts as a buffer between them. East of this, across the Red Sea at Aqaba in Jordan, the desert also protects Israel, as does its peace treaty with Amman.

With limited habitable space, most live in the mountains; the great deserts and salt plains of the interior of Iran are no place for human habitation. Just driving through them can subdue the human spirit, and living in them is a struggle few undertake.

This is also where the major Iranian oil fields are, the others being in the north and center. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s third-largest reserves. Despite this, Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections, and economic sanctions that have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernizing.

Iran is defended by this geography, with mountains on three sides, swampland and water on the fourth.

By the time of the Second Gulf War in 2003, even the United States, the greatest fighting force the world has seen, thought better than to take a right turn once it had entered Iraq from the south, knowing that even with its superior firepower, Iran was not a country to invade.

The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics.

A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.

This means that the threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are many restraining factors. One is that, in a straight line, it is one thousand miles from Israel to Iran.

A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card—the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 percent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point, the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only twenty-one miles across. The industrialized world fears the effect of Hormuz being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiraling prices. This is one reason why so many countries pressure Israel not to act.

When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf.