"So it is with all nations, big or small. The landscape imprisons the leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to maneuver. The rules of geography, which Hannibal, Sun Tzu, and Alexander the Great all knew, still apply to today's leaders."
Russia is a "land where power is hard to defend, and so for centuries its leaders have compensated by pushing outward. It is the land without mountains to its west." It has been attacked from the west by Poland (1605), Sweden (1708), France (1812), and Germany (1914 and 1941). "By 2004, fifteen years after 1989, every single Warsaw Pact country bar Russia was in NATO or the EU." For half a millennium, Russia has defended its flat plains by attacking outward. Thus, the policies of Vladimir Putin derive from those of Stalin, Alexander II, Catherine the Great, and Peter the Great.
The Chinese "heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and agricultural center of gravity" of the nation. With vast open plains to the north, the Chinese too adopted the attack-to-defend philosophy. After the humiliation of European and Japanese occupations, China today is a unified and secure country. To the north and east, sparsely populated Manchuria and Siberia pose no threats. To the south, only Vietnam has a border without natural obstructions, and the west is mountainous. Secure on land, China is building its navy to protect its sea lanes and eventually recover Taiwan, 140 miles off its coast. Access to Russian oil and gas, along with a pipeline to the Arabian Sea, may help China overcome its most significant geostrategic risk—the 500-mile-long Strait of Malacca.
"Geography has determined that if a political entity could get to and then control the land from sea to shining sea, it would be a great power, the greatest history has ever known." The US has been truly fortunate. Otto von Bismarck once said, "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States."
Western Europe also has been blessed with an excellent climate, fertile soil, navigable rivers, superb harbors, and a lack of natural disasters. However, with mountains, rivers that act as boundaries, and a long history, Europe has many languages and countries. The south is not as fortunate, with more mountains, fewer arable plains, and shorter rivers. Europe's only strategic threat remains Russia, one enhanced by the flat northern plains of the continent. (Note: this book was published in 2015, long before the war in Ukraine.)
Africa is cursed by a lack of natural harbors and rivers filled with waterfalls. The Sahara cuts it off from the Eurasian landmass, where ideas and technology were exchanged.
The Middle East (a purely European characterization) is a thousand miles wide and two thousand miles from north to south. It is filled with mountains, deserts, rivers, fertile plains, and cities. Its center is the Arabian Desert, which is the size of France. For centuries, it was part of the Ottoman Empire, in which there were no borders or lines in the sand. After WWI, Britain and France "arbitrarily created nation-states out of people unused to living together in one region, which has not been a recipe for justice, equality, or stability." Of all the nations created, Iraq was "an unholy mess," consisting of Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. To the various Arab tribes, Zionism, supported by the US and some Europeans, added the state of Israel. The states surrounding Israel—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—have not welcomed or granted rights to the Palestinians who fled Israel decades ago. The failure of pan-Arab nationalism has led to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. It is an unholy mess that continues. Equally problematic is the ancient, populous, wealthy, and nuclear-armed successor to the Persian Empire, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is very mountainous, which has defended it from intruders for thousands of years, but has also impeded the spread of its oil wealth throughout the country. Its aggressive desire to push its Shiite religion into Arabia and to destroy the state of Israel further adds tinder to the always-volatile region.
The Arctic brings us back again to Russia. The Arctic Ocean is small, but it is almost the size of Russia and one-and-a-half times the size of the US. The continental shelves "occupy more space proportionately than in any other ocean." The melting ice allows use of the Northwest Passage for a few months per year, and the Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast is open twice as long. International law gives each nation 200 miles of sovereignty, called the exclusive economic zone, over mineral rights from its shore. Russia is aggressively claiming more, building bases in the north, and moving armed forces to Murmansk. Putin has said the Arctic oilfields will be "our strategic reserve for the twenty-first century." Whether or not this becomes another Great Game remains to be seen.
Interesting, but not compelling. I skipped the chapters on India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, and Latin America.
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