The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World – the sequel to Prisoners of Geography

by Tim Marshall

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; ‘The Second Coming’, W. B. Yeats

Many people dislike the idea that the USA played the role of ‘world policeman’ in the post-Second World War era. You can make a case for both the positives and negatives of its actions. But, either way, in the absence of a policeman various factions will seek to police their own neighbourhood. If you get competing factions, the risk of instability increases.

They and the others were ‘Poms’, shortened from pomegranate, sometimes spelt pommygrant, which was close enough to the word ‘immigrant’ to be incorporated into Aussie slang.

It has abundant natural resources including many that are perfectly suited for selling around the world. Its wool, lamb, beef, wheat and wine industries remain world leaders; it holds a quarter of the world’s uranium reserves, the largest zinc and lead deposits, and is a major producer of tungsten and gold, as well as having healthy deposits of silver; and it is a key supplier of liquefied natural gas while also still producing large quantities of coal. And there we see

how the country is caught between an Ayers Rock and a hard place.

If the climate-change modelling is on target Australia will continue to suffer record-shattering heatwaves, drought and forest fires, creating a scorched, uninhabitable landscape. The more the suburbs of the great cities sprawl out into the countryside, the greater the number of people at risk. This means Australians are likely to continue to cling to the coastline, creating ever more densely packed urban areas, even as sea levels may be rising. The country could require a slow retreat from some areas and a long-term building plan for locations designated as lower-risk.

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

What’s in it for them? Influence equals access, and China wants access to fishing zones, ports for its fleets, possible mining of seabeds, and something else which is often overlooked: votes at the United Nations and other world bodies. The Chinese have successfully picked off many African countries and persuaded them not to recognize Taiwan, and 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.

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.

Covid-19 made Australia more aware of the limitations of the ‘just in time’ economic system, and, like many countries, has hardened its attitude towards being China-dependent and allowing China into critical infrastructure projects, freezing out China’s Huawei company from Australia’s 5G network – a bold move.

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

Dara Shikoh, The Confluence of the Two Seas

The radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Cairo in 1966, may have been a Sunni Muslim but his writings influenced the religious Shia revolutionaries in Iran. His seminal work Milestones had been translated into Farsi and fed into the idea that the answer to the problems in the Muslim world was Islam. Qutb had more influence in Arab countries, where the systems of royalty, nationalism, socialism and secular dictatorship had failed to better people’s lives, but when Khomeini declared that ‘Islam is political, or it is nothing’, he was saying what Qutb’s followers in the Muslim Brotherhood had been promulgating for more than a decade. Qutb believed in violent jihad to defeat ‘Crusaders and Zionists’; this, fused with the strain of martyrdom in Iranian Shia culture, was central to the fanaticism that gripped the religious masses during and after the revolution.

Ibn Saud had united Saudi Arabia by force of arms; to hold it together he then married a daughter from each of the defeated tribes and senior religious families. He had about twenty wives but, in accordance with religious law, never more than four at a time. The result was more than 100 children and the creation of a family network which dominates the state.

Sir Halford Mackinder, wrote: ‘Great consequences lie in the simple statements that Britain is an island group, set in an ocean, but off the shores of the great continent; that the opposing shores are indented.’ Some people dislike Mackinder’s writings because he was an imperialist and focused on the importance of geography on strategy. But he was also a supporter of democracy and of the League of Nations to help reduce great-power tensions, and was horrified at the rise of Nazism despite having inadvertently influenced some of its leaders’ thinking.

The author Eric Weiner notes in his book The Geography of Genius that ‘Other Greek city-states were larger (Syracuse) or wealthier (Corinth) or mightier (Sparta). Yet Athens produced more brilliant minds – from Socrates to Aristotle – than any other place the world has seen before or since.’

What they perfected has given us so much, for example Hippodamus, the father of urban planning; the great philosophers such as Aristotle; in medicine, Hippocrates; in mathematics, Pythagoras; and the world’s first known female mathematician, Hypatia. An estimated 150,000 English words derive from Greek, democracy, acrobat and sarcasm among them. We can also thank Greek antiquity for the term hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian – relating to long words.

Davutoğlu’s 2001 book Strategic Depth

Over a period of 1,000 years it’s estimated that more than 10 million black African slaves were forced up this route and sold into the Arab countries.

Despite being the regional power, Ethiopia has many issues. It has the potential to be self-sufficient in both energy and food; agriculture makes up almost half of Ethiopia’s GDP. However, periodic drought, deforestation, over-grazing, military dictatorship and poor infrastructure have held it back; and only one river, the Baro, is properly navigable, another factor that impedes internal trade.