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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Marshall
Read between
October 22 - November 19, 2023
Overall there is no one geographical factor that is more important than any other. Mountains are no more important than deserts, nor rivers than jungles. In different parts of the planet different geographical features are among the dominant factors in determining what people can and cannot do.
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.
Meanwhile, Latin America is an anomaly. In its far south it is so cut off from the outside world that global trading is difficult, and its internal geography is a barrier to creating a trading bloc as successful as the EU.
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.
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.
Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–56 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.
By 2004, just fifteen years after 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia was in NATO or the European Union.
Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there.
In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.
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.
They can be divided three ways: those that are neutral, the pro-Western group, and the pro-Russian camp.
The neutral countries—Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan—are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West. This is because all three produce their own energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade.
From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice—he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but most important the port of Sevastopol.
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.
For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, but the West could.
From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.
Until now China has never been a naval power—with its large landmass, multiple borders, and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive. Its merchants have long sailed the oceans to trade goods, but its navy did not seek territory beyond its region, and the difficulty of patrolling the great sea-lanes of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans was not worth the effort.
Mandarin is similar to Cantonese and many other languages when written, but very different when spoken.
The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected.
On china opening its border from old to now
Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory and, unfortunately for both, this is the one area to the south that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979.
That both countries are nominally ideologically Communist has little to do with the state of their relationship: it is their shared geography that has defined relations. Viewed from Beijing, Vietnam is only a minor threat and a problem that can be managed.
This brings us to Tibet and its importance to China. The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi’s side—the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.
This is the geopolitics of fear. 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.”
Demographics and geopolitics oppose Tibetan independence.
Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet.
Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans.
For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites.
There are similar reasons for the party’s resistance to democracy and individual rights. If the population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict.
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.
China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrializing as it modernizes and raises standards of living, but that very process threatens food production. If it cannot solve this problem there will be unrest.
Having spent four thousand turbulent years consolidating its landmass, China is now building a blue-water navy. A green-water navy patrols its maritime borders, a blue-water navy patrols the oceans.
China’s increasing long distance-shore-to ship artillery firepower will free up its growing navy to venture farther from its coastline because the navy will be become less vital for defense.
All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.
America is committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. However, if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the United States is not to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.
The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together.
Mexico is not blessed in the American way. It has poor-quality agricultural land, no river system to use for transport, and was wholly undemocratic, with new arrivals having little chance of ever being granted land.
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.
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?
Today no great power sponsors Cuba and it appears destined to come under the cultural, and probably political, influence of the United States again.
In 1949, Washington led the formation of NATO and with it effectively assumed command of the Western world’s surviving military might. The civilian head of NATO may well be a Belgian one year, a Brit the next, but the military commander is always an American, and by far the greatest firepower within NATO is American.
There were now only three places from which a challenge to American hegemony could come: a united Europe, Russia, and China. All would grow stronger, but two would reach their limits.
Americans care about Europe, they care about NATO, and they will sometimes act (if it is in the American interest), but Russia is now, for the Americans, mostly a European problem, albeit one they keep an eye on.
While all the other countries in the region matter, in what is a complicated diplomatic jigsaw puzzle, the key states look to be Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. These three sit astride the narrow Strait of Malacca. Every day through that strait come 12 million barrels of oil heading for an increasingly thirsty China and elsewhere in the region. As long as these three countries are pro-American, the Americans have a key advantage.
The Muslims had the greatest success in uniting the subcontinent under one leadership, but even Islam never overcame the linguistic, religious, and cultural differences.
What did Pakistan get out of this? Much less than India. It inherited India’s most troublesome border, the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan, and it was a state split into two noncontiguous regions with little to hold it together, as one thousand miles of Indian territory separated West Pakistan from East Pakistan.
Alaska and the rest of the United States have managed the problem of noncontiguous distance without difficulty, but they are culturally, linguistically, and economically linked and operating in a stable environment. The only connection between the two parts of Pakistan was Islam.
Pakistan is an Islamic state with a history of dictatorship and populations whose loyalty is often more to their cultural region than to the state.
