The Revenge of Geography by Robert D. Kaplan Read Free Book Online

globalization, as their bureaucratic capacities are eroded by long-running wars, attendant refugee movements, and the job of administering vast, badly urbanized cities. In sum, as the map of Eurasia gets smaller thanks to technology and population growth, artificial frontiers will begin to weaken inside it.
    Understanding the map of the twenty-first century means accepting grave contradictions. For while some states become militarily stronger, armed with weapons of mass destruction, others, especially in the Greater Middle East, weaken: they spawn substate armies, tied to specific geographies with all of the cultural and religious tradition which that entails, thus they fight better than state armies on the same territory ever could. Southern Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the former Tamil Tigers of northern Sri Lanka, the Maoist Naxalites in eastern and central India, the various pro-Taliban and other Pushtun tribal groupings in northwestern Pakistan, the Taliban itself in Afghanistan, and the plethora of militias in Iraq, especially during the civil war of 2006–2007, are examples of this trend of terrain-specific substate land forces. For at a time when precision-guided missiles can destroy a specific house hundreds of miles away, while leaving the adjacent one deliberately undamaged, small groups of turbaned irregulars can use the tortuous features of an intricate mountain landscape to bedevil a superpower. In the latter case the revenge of geography isclear. But in the former case, too, those missiles have to be fired from somewhere, which requires a land or a sea base, thus bringing us back to geography, albeit to a less intimate and traditional kind. For Spykman’s Indian Ocean Rimland is crucial for the placement of American warships, whose missiles are aimed deep into Iran and Afghanistan, two Heartland states, the latter of which is as riven by tribal conflicts as it was in the time of Alexander the Great. Spykman’s and Mackinder’s early-twentieth-century constructs coexist with those of antiquity, and both are relevant for our own era.
    The very burden of governing vast, poor urban concentrations has made statehood more onerous than at any previous time in history; a reason for the collapse of sclerotic dictatorships, as well as for the weakness of young democracies. A state like Pakistan can have weapons of mass destruction, even as it can barely provide municipal services and protect its population from suicide bombers. States like Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, to name but a few, barely function, and are besieged by substate militias. The Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, have engaged in violence to protest their condition, even as they have eschewed the compromises required for statehood. The same with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could have toppled the government in Beirut anytime it wanted, but chose not to. A state has to abide by certain rules and thus makes for an easier target. And so we have a new phenomenon in this age of megacities and mass media: the power of statelessness. “The state is a burden,” writes Jakub Grygiel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, so these substate groups “seek power without the responsibility of governing.” Modern communications and military technologies allow these groups to organize, to seek help abroad, and to arm themselves with lethal weapons so that the state no longer owns the monopoly on violence. As I’ve said earlier, whereas the Industrial Revolution was about bigness (airplanes, tanks, aircraft carriers, railways, factories, and so on) the post–Industrial Revolution is about smallness—miniature bombs and plastic explosives that do not require the large territory of a state to deploy. Small stateless groups are beneficiaries of this new age oftechnology. In fact, there are more and more reasons not to have a state. Grygiel writes:
    The greater the capability of nations to destroy one another, and of the great powers in particular, the more