Now here’s
a book that every single IR freshman in America should read. It lays out the
major long-term geopolitical conflicts that are mostly unavoidable due to the shape
of the land and sea and the borders of countries. It has chapters on Russia, China,
the USA, Japan and Korea, India and Pakistan, the Middle East, and the Arctic,
among others.
The
author several times talks about the importance of having certain ethnic groups
in one’s geographical borders. This is more demography than geography, but it
is absolutely crucial for Russia that it has ethnic Russians living in Poland,
Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. These ethnic Russians are likely to
support Russia in foreign affairs and put pressure on these countries and
regions to support Russia. China has the same thing going on in Malaysia, Singapore,
and the Philippines. When they wanted to take over Tibet in the 1950’s, the
Communist Party of China built roads and sent Han Chinese into Tibet to unify
it not only political, but economically and ethnically with the Chinese state.
This, of course, has nothing to do with Communism and everything to do with geography.
After all, Tibet is known as “China’s water tower” because it has the source of
the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong Rivers. China will never give it up. Marshall
tells us that Stalin drew the borders of Tajikistan and other central Asian states
to purposefully mix ethnicities, making the states less coherent and more vulnerable
to Russian interference.
The Russian-Chinese relationship
was especially interesting to me. Russia needs China as it finds iself
increasingly isolated byt European states and surrounded by NATO in the west.
However, in the east, the author points out that China will likely end up
controlling parts of Siberia due to Russia’s declining birth rate and the immigration
of Chinese citizens to the north. Massive economic deals with China have kept
Russia afloat, but soon it will find that China poses an even bigger threat to
Russian structural integrity that European unity ever could.
The
advantages of the United States in foreign affairs are tremendous. They
primarily come from the massive size of the country, the good land, the two
coasts on the world’s biggest oceans, and the type of people who immigrated there.
Think about this: The Homestead Act of 1862 was very important. It allowed you
to farm 160 acres of federally owned land for just five years and then it was
yours. This created a huge incentive for hard-working immigrants to go to the
United States instead of Latin America. After all, “why go to Latin America and
be a serf, when you could go the USA and be a free land-owning man?” The USA
was able to fill its land with people and give them equity in law and economy,
with the exception of non-whites. After World War 2, the United States’ power
grew greatly when they gained British naval bases in exchange for American
destroyers. Almost every British naval base in the Western Hemisphere was given
to the United States.
One new
term I learned was “GIUK,” standing for Germany, Iceland, United Kingdom and referring
to the naval gaps through which Russia would need to break through to reach the
Atlantic Ocean. It is absolutely critical that NATO control that area to make
sure that Russia stays a land power only and does not develop sea power.
Scottish independence would certainly cause problems for this.
The
author discusses Africa and Latin America in broad strokes, mainly in terms of
disadvantages. Africa confronts the problem that its many rivers do not flow
into each other as the Ohio and others flow into the Mississippi in North America.
In addition, waterfalls obstruct river traffic and a lack of natural harbors
obstructs sea traffic. Latin America faces the obstacles of the Amazon rainforest
and the Andes mountains, which cause very big gaps in the flow of people, goods,
and information. Almost all major Latin American cities are on the coastline, with
the exception of major Colombian cities.
Reading
this book, I got to the Middle East chapter and the Israel section made me much
more conservative. The author writes that, “The West Bank is almost seven times
the size of Gaza but is landlocked. Much of it comprises a mountain ridge which
runs north to south. From a military perspective, this gives whoever commands
the high ground control of the coastal plain on the western side of the ridge,
and of the Jordan Rift Valley to its east. Leaving to one side the ideology of
Jewish settlers, who claim the biblical right to live in what they call Judea
and Samaria, from a military perspective the Israeli view is that a non-Israeli
force cannot be allowed to control these heights, as heavy weapons could be
fired onto the coastal plain where 70 per cent of Israel’s population lives.
The plain also includes its most important road systems, many of its successful
high-tech companies, the international airport and most of its heavy industry.”
There it is right there. A two-state solution cannot work because Israel
absolutely must, to survive, keep heavy weapons that Arab nations would surely
provide to Palestine out of the West Bank. Interestingly, the same issue is at
play with North Korea and South Korea, in that NK has so many heavy weapons just
north of the DMZ that they would rain hellfire on Seoul in the case of war,
such that, even though South Korea could wipe out those positions in a matter
of days, the cost would be tremendous to civilians.
In conclusion,
this book is great and has lots of info packed into very few (just over 200)
pages. If you read it, you’ll get a lot more information I didn’t mention about
Chinese attempts to build a canal through Nicaragua, preparations for trade and
war in the Arctic, and the conflict between India and Pakistan. Top-notch book.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- If Tibet declares independence from China and calls itself a sovereign state, American treaties to not bind the USA to come to its rescue and China would assuredly conquer it.
- Marshall explains that Egypt could never have been a major naval force because, in spite of the fact that the Nile can feed millions of people, it is in a desert and there aren’t enough trees to find wood for ships. This made Egypt dependent on far away Lebanon cedar.
- Angola is the second greatest supplier of oil to China after Saudi Arabia.
- There has only ever been one official census in Lebanon because demographic issues are so sensitive there. This is because the political system was fundamentally based on the majority Christian population which is by now definitely a minority. That census was taken in 1932.
Here’s a map I liked:
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