The Revenge of Geography

This post is a perhaps a bit outside the norm for an analysis forum--depending, I suppose, on how one defines "discussions in the analysis realm"--but I just finished reading Robert Kaplan's most recent book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Is About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, and I couldn't resist sharing.  (If the urge to read the full work doesn't consume you, an article length treatment published in Foreign Policy is available here.)

Amazon summarizes the book as building "on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene."  These great geographers and geopolitical thinkers include people to admire (Sir Halford Mackinder whose Democratic Ideals and Reality should be required reading for every policy analyst; Alfred Thayer Mahan; Sir Julian Corbett; Nicholas Spykman, etc.) and some, such as Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism, for whom the opposite sentiment will dominate.  This is a fairly long-winded way of saying that the first half of Kaplan's work is very much a book-report regurgitating the ideas of others.  While I happen to prefer reading the primary sources (see the seminal strategic works of Mahan and Corbett, for example, that are available online here and here through the genius of Project Gutenberg) Kaplan's summary is worth reading as an introduction.  With this introduction then in hand...

..the second half of the book then applies the principles of geopolitics to Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran, the rest of the Middle East and the former Ottoman Empire, and to the relationship between the United States and Mexico.  It's almost as if the rest of the book is a prelude to the central point Kaplan wishes to make regarding U.S. grand strategy vis-a-vis our "failing" neighbor to the south.  (This last comes with shades of George Friedman's work in The Next 100 Years, and makes one wonder if Kaplan's STRATFOR connection is showing through.)  This discussion addresses the geopolitical motives for each of the regions and states described, illuminates the geopolitical seams along which conflict may concentrate, and makes implicit and explicit suggestions regarding U.S. policy based on these geopolitical discussions.

So, why do I offer all this up?  First, it's refreshing to see the unfairly maligned--and, in my opinion, very powerful--discipline of geopolitics given a hearing, especially from a voice likely to resonate in policy circles.  Second, in the world of force structure analysis (the world in which I was analytically raised) these issues seem to matter a great deal.  Identifying the potential (dare one say likely?) contexts and causes of future conflict matters in determinations of force posture (e.g., the pivot to Asia that we're not supposed to call a pivot), basing, capability requirements, etc., has obvious value in my little world.  These questions can be viewed absent considerations of geopolitics, of course, but the additional rigorous analytic lens these considerations offer seems quite powerful (and multiple lenses is usually best, it seems, to avoid being trapped by our assumptions).

What thinkest thou?

Merf