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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Marshall
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February 20 - February 26, 2018
In the United States, once the land had been taken from its original inhabitants, much of it was sold or given away to small landholders; by contrast, in Latin America the Old World culture of powerful landowners and serfs was imposed, which led to inequality.
In some cases, for example in Peru and Argentina, the metropolitan area of the capital city contains more than 30 percent of the country’s population. The colonialists concentrated on getting the wealth out of each region, to the coast and on to foreign markets. Even after independence the predominantly European coastal elites failed to invest in the interior, and what population centers there are inland remain poorly connected with one another.
Mexico is growing into a regional power, but it will always have the desert wastelands in its north, its mountains to the east and west, and its jungles in the south, all physically limiting its economic growth.
Central America is hill country with deep valleys, and at its narrowest point is only 120 miles across. Then, running parallel to the Pacific, for 4,500 miles, is the longest continuous mountain chain in the world—the Andes. They are snow-capped along their entire length and mostly impassable, thus cutting off many regions in the west of the continent from the east.
Particularly bitter is the relationship between Bolivia and Chile, which dates back to the 1879 War of the Pacific
Another border dispute dating back to the nineteenth century is indicated by the borders of the British territory of Belize and neighboring Guatemala.
Chile and Argentina argue over the Beagle Channel water route, Venezuela claims half of Guiana, and Ecuador has historical claims on Peru.
South America is in effect a demographically hollow continent and its coastline is often referred to as the “populated rim.” This is less true of Central America and especially Mexico, where the populations are more equally distributed; but Mexico in particular has difficult terrain, which limits its ambitions and foreign policies.
In its far north, Mexico has a two-thousand-mile-long border with the United States, 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 neighbor—but a buffer that is more advantageous to the Americans than the Mexicans due to the disparity in their technology.
Mexico’s major mountain ranges, the Sierra Madres, dominate the west and east of the country and between them is a plateau.
On the western slopes of the highlands and in the valleys the soil is poor, and the rivers of limited assistance in moving goods to market. On the eastern slopes the land is more fertile, but the rugged terrain still prevents Mexico from developing as it would like.
Throughout history, successive governments in Mexico City have never had a firm grip on the country.
substantial investment in Latin America from China, which is slowly but steadily supplanting the United States as the region’s main trading partner.
We’ve grown used to seeing the Chinese as major players in Africa, but for twenty years now they have been quietly moving in south of the Rio Grande. As well as investing in construction projects, China is lending huge sums of money to Latin American governments, notably those in Argentina, Venezuela, and Ecuador. In return, China will be expecting support in the United Nations for its regional claims back home, including the issue of Taiwan.
For example, China has now replaced the United States as Brazil’s main trading partner, and may do the same with several other Latin American countries.
the United States used force in Latin America almost fifty times between 1890 and the end of the Cold War.
Since then the United States has concentrated on binding the Latin American countries to itself economically by building up existing trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Association, and introducing others such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Beijing now sells or donates arms to Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, and offers them military exchanges.
A third of Brazil is jungle, where it is painfully expensive, and in some areas illegal, to carve out land fit for modern human habitation. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is a long-term ecological problem for the whole world, but it is also a medium-term problem for Brazil: the government allows slash-and-burn farmers to cut down the jungle and then use the land for agriculture. But the soil is so poor that within a few years crop-growing is untenable.
Brazil does not have direct access to the rivers of the Rio de la Plata region. The River Plate itself empties out into the Atlantic in Argentina, meaning that for centuries traders have moved their goods down the Plate to Buenos Aires rather than carry them up and down the Grand Escarpment to get to Brazil’s underdeveloped ports.
The Texas-based geopolitical intelligence company Stratfor.com estimates that Brazil’s seven largest ports combined can handle fewer goods per year than the single American port of New Orleans.
The EU countries have similar political and economic systems and most members share a currency, whereas the Latin Americans differ in their politics, economics, currencies, education levels, and labor laws. They also have to overcome the constraints of distance, as well as the heights of the mountains and the density of the jungles that separate them.
There is a frontier dispute with Uruguay, but it does not look set to become inflamed; and the rivalry between Brazil and Argentina is unlikely to be played out anywhere more politically significant than a soccer field.
That does not mean it will achieve this potential—simply that if Argentina gets the economics right, its geography will enable it to become the power it has never been. The foundations for this potential were laid in the nineteenth century with military victories over Brazil and Paraguay that resulted in control of the flat agricultural regions of the Rio de la Plata, the navigable river system, and therefore the commerce that flows down it toward Buenos Aires and its port. This is among the most valuable pieces of real estate on the whole continent. It immediately gave Argentina an economic
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The Arctic Ocean is 5.4 million square miles; this might make it the world’s smallest ocean but it is still almost as big as Russia, and one and a half times the size of the United States.
The effects of the melting ice won’t just be felt in the Arctic: countries as far away as the Maldives, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands are at risk of increased flooding as the ice melts and sea levels rise. These ramifications are why the Arctic is a global, not just a regional, issue.
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 polar route was 40 percent shorter and used deeper waters than if it had gone through the Panama Canal.
It is thought that vast quantities of undiscovered natural gas and oil reserves may lie in the Arctic region in areas that can now be accessed. In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated that 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, and 90 billion barrels of oil are in the Arctic, with the vast majority of it offshore.
The “Arctic Five,” those states with borders on the Arctic, are Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (due to its responsibility for Greenland). They are joined by Iceland, Finland, and Sweden, which are also full members.
There are currently 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.
Norway, a NATO state, knows what is coming and has made the High North its foreign policy priority. Its air force regularly intercepts Russian fighter jets approaching its borders; the heightened tensions have caused it to move its center of military operations from the south of the country to the north, and it is building an Arctic battalion. Canada is reinforcing its cold-weather military capabilities, which includes five new navy warships with moderate ice-breaking capability to be delivered between 2018 and 2022.
Russia meanwhile is building an Arctic army. Six new military bases are being constructed and several mothballed Cold War installations—such as those on the Novosibirsk Islands—are reopening, and airstrips are being renovated.
All this is, in many ways, a continuation, or at the least a resurrection, of Russia’s Cold War Arctic policies. The Russians know that NATO can bottle up their Baltic Fleet by blockading the Skagerrak Strait.
It takes up to $1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013.
By contrast, the United States has a fleet of one functioning heavy icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, down from the eight it possessed in the 1960s, and has no plans to build another.
No other nation presents a challenge, either: Canada has six icebreakers and is building a new one; Finland has eight; Sweden, seven; and Denmark, four. China, Germany, and Norway have one each.
The United States is also in dispute with Russia over the Bering Sea, Arctic Ocean, and northern Pacific.
Other disputes include the one between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island, located in the Nares Strait, which separates Greenland from Ellesmere Island.
All the sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears—the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose.
Smuggling occurs wherever there are transit routes, and there is no reason to believe the Arctic will be any different; but policing it will be difficult due to the conditions there.
Geography has always been a prison of sorts—one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.
in Europe no conscious decision was made to become a huge trading area; the long, level networks of rivers made it possible, and to an extent inevitable, over the course of millennia.
India and China will still be separated by the Himalayas. They may eventually come into conflict with each other, but if that does happen, then geography will determine the nature of the fight:
Great ideas and great leaders are part of the push and pull of history. But they must all operate within the confines of geography. The leaders of Bangladesh might dream of preventing the waters from flooding up the Bay of Bengal, but they know that 80 percent of the country is on a floodplain and cannot be moved.
Global warming may well result in the mass movement of people.
And if the desertification of the lands just below the Sahel continues, then wars such as the one in Darfur, Sudan (partially caused by the desert encroaching on nomads in the north, which in turn pushed them southward toward the Fur people), will intensify and spread.
Even if stable democracies were to emerge in the Middle East in the coming decades, if the waters of the Murat River, which rises in Turkey before feeding the Euphrates, were to diminish considerably, then the dams Turkey would have to build to protect its own source of life could quite easily be the cause of war with Syria and Iraq downstream.
Farther on, at least five American flags are thought to be still standing on the surface of the moon, and farther still, much farther, our machines have made it out past Mars and Jupiter, some heading way beyond what we can see and are trying to understand.
In addition, America and China are engaged in developing laser technology, which can be used as weapons, and both seek to ensure that they have a missile system that can operate in space and nullify the competition’s version. Many of the technologically advanced nations are now making preparations in case they need to fight in space.
