The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World (Politics of Place Book 4)

by Tim Marshall

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was deposed in a coup d’état by the military using violent street theater to hide their hand; in Libya, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown and then murdered; and in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad hung on by his fingertips until the Russians and Iranians saved him. In all three cases the Americans signaled they would not save the dictators they had done business with for decades. The US slowly withdrew from the international scene during the eight years of the Obama presidency, a move continued under Donald Trump for four years. Meanwhile, other countries such as India, China, and Brazil began to emerge as new world powers, with rapidly growing economies, looking to expand their own global influence.

Like Prisoners of Geography, The Power of Geography looks at mountains, rivers, seas, and concrete to understand geopolitical realities. Geography is a key factor shaping what humanity can and cannot do.

There remains among some people a disdain for this starting point as it is deemed deterministic. There has been talk of a “flat world” in which financial transactions and communications through cyberspace have collapsed distance, and landscape has become meaningless. However, that is a world inhabited only by a tiny fraction of people who may well speak via videoconference, and then fly over mountains and seas to speak in person; but it is not the experience of most of the other 8 billion people on Earth. Egyptian farmers still rely on Ethiopia for water. The mountains to the north of Athens still hinder its trade with Europe. Geography is not fate—humans get a vote in what happens—but it matters.

Iran, for example, is shaping the future of the Middle East. A pariah state with a nuclear agenda, it must keep its Shia “corridor” to the Mediterranean open via Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut to maintain influence. Its regional rival Saudi Arabia, a country built on oil and sand, has always counted America as an ally. But as demand for oil declines and the US becomes more energy independent, its interest in the Middle East will slowly wane.

The popular concept of the egalitarian, straight-talking, no-nonsense, indomitable Aussie spirit may be a cliché, but it is also real. It has emerged from a vast, scorchingly hot land, much of which cannot be inhabited, out of which has sprung a flourishing modern society that has shifted from being virtually monocultural to one of the most multicultural in the world.

Australia’s size and location are both a strength and a weakness. They protect it from invasion but also held back its political development. They make it necessary to have extensive long-distance trade links, which in turn requires a strong navy to ensure the sea lanes are kept open. And Australia is isolated by distance from its key allies.

Along the crescent heading west are the suburbs and satellite towns, which extend inland for about 250 miles before petering out once you are over the mountains and heading into the extreme remote regions.

Almost 50 percent of the people live in just three cities—Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. By no coincidence, they are adjacent to the location of the Murray–Darling River Basin. The Murray–Darling River Basin supported the early European settlements in southeast Australia. Most of the country’s rivers are seasonal in their flow, so water links were never a major part of its development. The annual discharge of all the rivers on the continent amounts to less than half of that just from the Yangtze in China. If we exclude Tasmania, the only Australian rivers that have a permanent flow are in the eastern and southwestern regions. The two biggest are the Murray River and its tributary the Darling River. Fed by melting snows in the Australian Alps, the Murray has enough volume to run uninterrupted for 1,600 miles to the southern coast. Parts of it are navigable and it is the jewel in the crown of the Murray–Darling Basin. However, shipping cannot enter from the sea, which limits the river’s ability to move goods. It was used in the nineteenth century to support upriver trade, but even these smaller vessels had problems with the lack of rainfall, and some would become stuck upstream on dried-out tributaries. Nevertheless, the Murray–Darling system contains the fertile lands that have fed and watered generations of Australians. Without it the first settlers would barely have got off the beach.

the first recorded landing was in 1606, when Willem Janszoon and the crew of the Dutch sailing ship Duyfken went ashore in northern Australia. Janszoon thought he was on the island of New Guinea and, after a hostile encounter with locals, soon departed. Several more European expeditions came and went, but no one bothered to explore inland.

Ships were readied, convicts assembled, supplies loaded, and the so-called First Fleet set sail from Portsmouth, England, on May 13, 1787, reaching Botany Bay on January 24, 1788. The eleven ships carried about 1,500 souls, 730 convicts (570 men and 160 women) and the rest free persons, mostly navy personnel.

the Murri from Queensland, the Nunga from the south of South Australia, and the Palawa from Tasmania—all of which can be broken into subgroups. In 1788 the populations are thought to have totaled between 250,000 and 500,000,

the Frontier Wars, as they became known. Historians argue over the levels of violence, but it’s estimated that about two thousand colonists and many times that number of Aboriginals were killed, the latter suffering numerous massacres. It is a sorry tale of one side seeing the other as having no rights; indeed, many colonists regarded the Aboriginals as barely human.

The right to vote in national elections had been given them only in 1962, and it took until 1967 for the Aboriginal people to be formally acknowledged as part of the Australian population.

As the civil rights activist Faith Bandler put it in 1965, “Australians have to register their dogs and cattle, but we don’t know how many Aborigines there are.”

In the 1990s the name of the massive rust-colored desert monolith known as Ayers Rock was changed to Ayers Rock/Uluru to acknowledge its original name in the language of the Anangu people, for whom it is a sacred site, and in 2002 was switched to Uluru/Ayers Rock.

Despite all the deprivations, the population grew during the twentieth century. Estimates in the 1920s put it as low as 60,000, whereas now there are about 800,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (who are ethnically different from Aboriginals), centered mainly in Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. Most of the hundreds of languages are lost, and of those that survive there are perhaps 50,000 people who can speak at least one.

By 1825 explorers had already breached what was considered an impassable barrier—the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney—and discovered that beyond them lay the great Outback. The population then was 50,000; by 1851 it had grown to about 450,000, by which time penal transportation had dropped significantly as many of the newcomers were immigrants seeking a new life in a new world. They’d arrived in time for the first Australian gold rush, located north of Melbourne, which began to transform Australian society as hundreds of thousands of people came from abroad to try their luck. Most of them were from Britain, but they also arrived from China, North America, Italy, Germany, Poland, and a smattering of other countries. Thanks to this “gold generation,” Australia’s population not only rocketed to 1.7 million in the early 1870s, but gradually started to become more ethnically and culturally diverse.

They all contributed to the emerging Australian character, but there is a theory that the diggers, as the prospectors were called, forged the resourcefulness, can-do attitude and friendliness for which Australians are known. The Old World social niceties meant little up in the rugged, muddy prospecting regions, and the independent, yet simultaneously collegiate spirit of the diggers contributed to an identity with less respect for British colonial authority than before.

The rivers, as we’ve seen, were not suited to trade and transport, and so initially, in order to move anything by land humans usually had to drag it themselves over rough tracks, since there were few beasts of burden available. The early transport systems concentrated on each individual port sending goods inland, or back out to the mother country, the UK. Because each region was a separate colony, connecting them along the coastline was not a priority; so these early roads led inland but not, at least for significant distances, along the coast. With such limited options, each colony continued to develop as a separate entity.

on January 1, 1901, the six British colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Half a million people lined the streets of Sydney to celebrate. Australia had not become a sovereign state, only a “self-governing colony” (despite becoming a UN member in 1945, it wasn’t until 1986 that full independence was achieved by the Australia Act), but a great leap forward in self-determination had been achieved.

One of the first laws the new government passed was the Immigration Restriction Act, which became known as the White Australia policy. The wording of the act is not explicit on the page but is clearly racist in intent, barring “any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer.” In the extraordinary circumstance that, say, a would-be immigrant from China could write out fifty words dictated in Portuguese, he or she could always be asked to do the test again, this time in, let’s say, Flemish. As stated, the language was chosen “by the officer,” and the application of the test was usually to put a legal stamp on a decision already made. Most people refused entry were nonwhite, but the act could also be used to deport immigrants who were not naturalized if they were jailed for a violent crime.

The new law was aimed mostly at Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, and anyone else from the wider neighborhood who might not only come and undercut wages but also dilute the racial “purity” of Australia. The White Australia policy continued up into the 1970s. At all times it was viewed extremely negatively by Australia’s Asian neighbors, especially those emerging from the colonial era.

The post–Second World War period saw the so-called Ten Pound Poms arrive in droves. Australia still needed to grow its workforce, and so for just £10 Britons could sail to Australia to start a new life. The full fare was about £120, almost six months’ wages for many working-class people, and the offer was one that many in drab, postwar, class-bound Britain could not refuse. Between 1947 and 1982 more than 1.5 million set out for down under, opportunity, sunshine, and at first—frequently—hardship.

They and the others were poms, shortened from pomegranate, sometimes spelled pommygrant, which was close enough to the word “immigrant” to be incorporated into Aussie slang.

Following were many Hungarians who had escaped after the 1956 revolution, then Czechs after the Soviet occupation in 1968.

However, Australia is vulnerable to blockade. Most of its imports and exports flow through a series of narrow passageways to the north—including the Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok Straits—and many of those could be closed in times of conflict.

However, given the size of the country, its population, and its middle-ranking wealth, Australia cannot operate a navy capable of protecting all of the sea approaches to its shores. Simply patrolling the seas closest to Australia is a challenge. The mainland has 22,000 miles of coastline and there’s an additional 15,000 miles of island coastline to keep an eye on.

“The Australian Government, therefore, regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies’ fighting plan.

The war also came to Australia. On February 19, 1942, the Japanese air force unleashed a devastating attack on the Allied military port of Darwin, using the same aircraft carrier group that had attacked Pearl Harbor ten weeks earlier.

More alarm bells had begun to ring earlier in 2020 as the Chinese started to scope out Papua New Guinea’s Daru Island following an agreement to build a huge fisheries complex there. The island is just 125 miles from the Australian mainland,

China is by far its biggest trading partner, although levels of investment fluctuate sometimes in line with those of diplomatic warmth. In recent years, about 1.4 million Chinese arrived annually for holidays, and Chinese students made up 30 percent of people from abroad studying in the country. China buys almost a third of Australia’s exported farm produce, including 18 percent of its beef exports and half its barley. It is also a major market for Australia’s iron ore, gas, coal, and gold.

But Beijing is still busy pouring concrete onto small rocks sticking out of the water more than 1,000 miles from its mainland, calling them islands, and then constructing runways, radar stations, and missile batteries on them.

Much of the rapid military progress shown by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army suggests a medium-term ambition to extend the range of its “area-denial capability”—a concept meaning the ability to prevent enemy forces from coming into, staying in, or even crossing a defined geographical area. In recent years that has meant developing weapons which could, in case of war, try to push the Americans, or others, out of the South and East China Seas and past the first island chain, the string of islands stretching from Japan down to the Philippines. Australia now worries that China hopes eventually to project the area-denial region even farther—south of Indonesia

The Chinese have successfully picked off many African countries and persuaded them not to recognize Taiwan, and they are now attempting the same in the Pacific. In 2019, despite intense American and Australian lobbying, Kiribati and the Solomon Islands severed ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China.

The Pacific islanders are keenly aware of Australia’s colonial history and take a dim view of anything that might hint at paternalism. It helps to refer to places such as Vanuatu not as “small island nations” but “large ocean states,” as the islands now prefer, based on their large, exclusive maritime zones.

Australia has frozen China’s Huawei company out from its 5G network—a bold move.

Australia is also an enthusiastic member of what is probably the world’s most efficient intelligence-gathering network—the so-called Five Eyes—along with the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Canada.

Australia and Japan are developing a military relationship that includes joint air and sea combat exercises and a “visiting forces agreement.” Both are acutely aware of their lack of self-sufficiency in energy supplies and the consequent dangers of supply routes being blocked. Japan imports 85 percent of its crude oil from the Middle East and South Korea imports over 60 percent from the same source. Both countries have well-developed refining industries and they sell Australia almost half of the refined petroleum it imports. As we have seen, if the routes from the Middle East into the South and East China Seas and across to Japan are blocked, Australia would run out of energy and grind to a halt within weeks.

Iran is defined by two geographic features: its mountains, which form a ring of crust on most of its borders, and the mostly flat salt deserts of the interior, along which run lower-range hills roughly parallel to one another. The mountains make Iran a fortress.

The Dasht-e Kavir is known as the Great Salt Desert. It’s approximately 500 miles long and 200 miles wide—about the size of the Netherlands and Belgium combined. I’ve driven through parts; there’s not much to see other than dull, flat scrubland. But it’s not necessarily wise to try to find something to see. In some parts layers of salt on the surface conceal mud deep enough to drown in—and drowning in a desert seems a particularly stupid way to die.

For most of that history, the land was known as Persia. It was renamed Iran only in 1935 in an attempt to represent the country’s non-Persian minorities, which constitute about 40 percent of the population.

Internally, the desolate and unforgiving landscape is why almost all Iranians live in the mountains. Because they are difficult to traverse, populated mountain regions tend to develop distinct cultures. Ethnic groups cling to their identities and resist absorption, making it harder for the modern state to foster a sense of national unity. Because of its mountains, Iran’s main centers of population are widely dispersed and, until recently, poorly connected. Even now, only half of the country’s roads are paved. So although the population are all Iranians, they are from many different ethnic groups.

Persian (Farsi) is spoken as a first tongue by about 60 percent of Iranians and is the official language of the Islamic Republic. However, Kurds, Balochis, Turkmen, Azerbaijanis (Azeris), and Armenians all use their own languages, as do a host of smaller groups, such as Arabs, Circassians, and the seminomadic Lur tribes. There are even a few villages in which Georgian is spoken. The tiny community of Jews (around eight thousand people) can be traced all the way back to the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE. This diversity, especially among the larger groups such as the Kurds and Azeris, means that the country’s rulers have always attempted to have a strong, centralized, and often repressive government in order to keep its minorities under control and ensure that no region can break away or assist outside powers. This is as true of the ayatollahs as it was of their predecessors.

Kurds form about 10 percent of the population—perhaps 8.5 million people. They are the second-largest minority after the Azeris (16 percent).

dream of an independent Kurdish state. Their ethnicity, language, independent spirit, and the fact that most are Sunni Muslims in a Shia-dominated country have brought them into conflict with the central authorities for centuries.

Their most recent uprising, which followed the Islamic Revolution of 1979, took the Iranian military three years to crush.

Tehran sits below the Elburz Mountains. It is a feature of Iranian towns that, due to their lack of water, many are at the feet of hills and get their water supply from tunnels dug on the mountain slopes that feed small canals running down into the urban areas. I fell into one once while being chased by the Tehran police—more on which later. This lack of water is one of several factors that has held Iran back economically. About one-tenth of the land is cultivated, a mere third of which is irrigated.

Given that Iran holds the world’s fourth-largest reserves of oil and second-largest of gas, it should be a rich country; but the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) saw the refining facilities in Abadan destroyed, and only recently has production recovered to preconflict levels.

Energy is Iran’s most important export. Its oil fields are in the regions facing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq, with a smaller field inland near Qom. The gas fields are mostly in the Elburz Mountains and the Persian Gulf. One of the main export routes is into the Gulf of Oman via the Strait of Hormuz. This is Iran’s only way out to the open ocean lanes and at its narrowest the strait is just twenty-one miles across. The width of the shipping lane in either direction is about two miles, with a two-mile buffer zone between them to avoid accidents. For Iran this is a double-edged sword. One of the reasons it has never been a sea power is that it can easily be prevented from reaching the ocean. However, the width of the strait means that Tehran can threaten to close it to everyone else. Given that one-fifth of global oil supplies pass through it, closure would mean a world of pain. Closure would hurt Iran as well and probably mean war; but it’s a card it can play, and the regime has invested in means by which to try to make it a trump card.

hopefully, without being targeted by the missiles Iran has given to its Houthi allies in Yemen.