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

dangerous it is to have a state, especially for groups whose goal is to challenge the existing powers. 16
    A state is a bad fit, he goes on, for those with absolutist goals inspired by religious zeal or ideological extremism that can never be realized by statehood. The mass exodus to slums in our era, by cutting off the link with the traditional countryside, has helped in this process of radicalization along the broad swath of the southern Eurasian rimland. The mass media, to which these groups have access, publicize their demands and in the process further fortify their identities, creating crowd packs of fellow thinkers not necessarily defined by state loyalties. In sum, if we step back a moment and consider the situation, we have a map of Eurasia that is one huge area rather than the smaller divisions of Cold War regions that we have grown used to. This map is overloaded with nodes of contact and communications that never or barely existed before: for in addition to extended cities and overlapping missile ranges and ideologies that reverberate on account of mass media, we will have new roads and ports and energy pipelines connecting the Middle East and Central Asia with the rest of Eurasia from Russia to the Indian Ocean to China. With civilizations densely jammed one against the other, and the media a vehicle for constant verbal outrages, as well as for popular pressure from oppressed groups, the need for quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy will never be greater. One crisis will flow into the next, and there will be perennial need for everyone to
calm down
. Because of the map’s very cohesion and shrinkage, concepts like “Heartland” and “Rimland” and “marginal” zones, which imply a horizontal separating out into large component parts, will in one sense be less relevant, but in another sense will be fraught with consequence becauseof the perpetual interactions between these areas: a watch, or a computer chip for that matter, is no less complex because of its size, and to understand how that watch or chip works one must still disaggregate it to see how one part affects the other. The airplane, the Internet, the concentration of politics in vast cities that more and more look like one another will, to be sure, erode the importance of the relief map. Indeed, the very orality of the Internet has a way of turning territorial battles into battles of ideas (a reason why the humanism of Isaiah Berlin is something we will desperately need to hold on to). But as states themselves, no matter how well armed, become fragile, precisely because of how democracy and cyberspace will be friendly to subnational and supranational forces, smaller regions will emerge in bolder lines, as they did during the Middle Ages following the breakup of the Roman Empire.
    Yet now that we inhabit Mackinder’s “closed political system,” which, as Bracken notes, has closed much further in the course of the twentieth century, the map is also subject to the law of entropy, meaning a state of equilibrium will eventually set in, with each human habitation on the relief map—not just the megacities—looking increasingly like one another, and be subject to similar passions. The result, according to Ohio State University political science professor Randall L. Schweller, is that “a sort of global ennui” will result, the consequence of overstimulation, “mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states.” 17 In other words, the world will be both duller and more dangerous than ever before.
    But before the dullness completely sets in, there will upheavals and power shifts and natural geopolitical evolutions that can usefully be described by reference to the relief map.
    It is now time to explore in depth various regions of the globe, with a particular emphasis on the super-continent of Eurasia, bearing in mind all that we have learned from these historians, geopoliticians, and other thinkers. For in