A Book Review: Power Shifts ‘The Revenge of Geography,’ by Robert D. Kaplan

By ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER

The New York Times 
October 5, 2012

Those who forget geography can never defeat it. That is the mantra of Robert D. Kaplan’s new book, “The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate.”Each chapter begins with a reading of the lineaments of territory in the way a fortuneteller reads the lines on a palm, a mapping of mountains, rivers and plains as determinants of destiny. But just as the text starts to teeter under the weight of geographical determinism, Kaplan quickly shifts ground, arguing for “the partial determinism we all need” (italics in the original). He retreats to the far more moderate view that geography is an indispensable “backdrop” to the human drama of ideas, will and chance.

Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, resurrects 19th- and early-20th-century thinkers like Halford J. Mackinder, whose 1904 article “The Geographical Pivot of History” argued that control of the Eurasian “Heartland” would determine the fate of empires. Similarly, other contemporaneous strategists like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Nicholas J. Spykman may have favored sea power over land power, but they still described world history in terms of the eternal clash between the two (Sparta versus Athens, Venice versus Prussia). Spykman also answered Mackinder’s Heartland obsession with a focus on European, Indian and Pacific “Rimlands.” 

Most of what these authors proposed would sound politically incorrect today — imperialist and racist. Mackinder’s theories were appropriated (misappropriated, according to Kaplan) by the Nazis. Still, these geostrategists saw past the ritualized etiquette of diplomacy and the embedded expectations of law to the stark and enduring struggle for survival — tribe against tribe, invaders against inhabitants. Their strength lies in their appreciation of the ways in which the fixed elements of geography and climate shaped the more variable element of human choice — the story Jared Diamond tells today in his classic “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” 

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