Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

“Broadly speaking, geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors: not just the physical landscape—the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example—but also climate, demographics, cultural regions, and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an important impact on many different aspects of our civilization, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade, and religion.” 

Geographical features not only form borders between nations and regions but also help determine the political, cultural, and economic life within nations and regions. For example, the natural borders created in Europe by rivers and mountains helped foster the growth of distinct groups, with their own cultures, languages, and governments.

“From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat. Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day.”

The North European Plain offers Western European nations easy military access to Russia, while its navy is bottled up by ice in the north and narrow straits elsewhere. In the south, Muslim insurgents or invaders periodically make forays into Russia. Over the centuries, these conditions have dictated Russian foreign policy. 

“If we look at China’s modern borders we see a great power now confident that it is secured by its geographical features, which lend themselves to effective defense and trade.” 

With a high plateau and mountains in the west, deserts to the north, seas to the east and south, and jungles in the southwest, China has considerable natural barriers to invasion. Its ambitions now focus on the seas, where its navy seeks to dominate the western Pacific while its cargo fleet carries more and more goods across the world’s oceans.

“China’s massive population, mostly crammed into the heartland, is looking for ways to expand. Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Commanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans.”

The Chinese ethnic majority Han population has overtaken the Tibetan plateau, partly to ease crowding elsewhere and partly to ensure that the Tibetan frontier remains under the firm control of China. 

“It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen—the US Navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals in the seas; and how those bumps are managed—especially the Sino-American ones—will define great power politics in this century.” 

China claims for itself the South China Sea, which angers its neighbors, who are used to untrammeled access. The US objects as well, concerned that China’s usurpation of those waters is merely the beginning of Chinese territorial expansion into regions where America enjoys trade and military alliances.

“All great nations spend peacetime preparing for when war breaks out.”

Any country that assumes that it won’t suffer an invasion is courting disaster. A well-prepared country, on the other hand, has much less to fear.

“China is not weighed down or motivated diplomatically or economically by human rights in its dealings with the world. It is secure in its borders, straining against the bonds of the first island chain, and now moving around the globe with confidence. If it can avoid a serious conflict with Japan or the United States, then the only real danger to China is itself”

China’s greatest risk is internal. Should its modernization and development program slow, tens of millions of its citizens will suffer, and political instability may set in, putting the largest population in the world at risk of economic disaster.

“If you won the lottery, and were looking to buy a country to live in, the first one the real estate agent would show you would be the United States of America [...] It’s in a wonderful neighborhood, the views are marvelous, and there are some terrific water features, the transport links are excellent, and the neighbors? The neighbors are great, no trouble at all.” 

Separated from most of the world’s dangerous hotspots by two oceans, one on each side of the country, America enjoys physical isolation. Its interior boasts an excellent river system and fertile farmlands. To the north lies Canada, a friendly country with similar politics and culture; to the south lies Mexico, whose problems are mostly separated from the US by a large desert.

“There are fifty American states, but they add up to one nation in a way the twenty-eight sovereign states of the European Union never can.”

America’s states have evolved under one political system and with one language, whereas Europe’s polyglot nations have fought each other, off and on, for centuries. The EU struggles to hold itself together in the face of modern stresses that strike its members unevenly, causing disagreements and conflicts.

“The deadly game in this century will be how the Chinese, Americans, and others in the region manage each crisis that arises without losing face and without building up a deep well of resentment and anger on both sides.” 

As modern trade and communication make the world smaller, the great nations—with their ongoing ambitions for power and wealth—will bump up against one another with greater frequency. These tense moments will have to be negotiated carefully, lest wars break out. If today’s military powers, armed with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, engage in battle, the entire planet may be at risk. 

“The modern world, for better or worse, springs from Europe. This western outpost of the great Eurasian landmass gave birth to the Enlightenment, which led to the Industrial Revolution, which has resulted in what we now see around us every day. For that, we can give thanks to, or blame, Europe’s location.”

Europe is blessed with fertile soils, temperate climate, and good rivers. These encouraged prosperity and, eventually, the first modern industries that make European nations among the dominant powers on the globe. Its technology spread to other countries, some of whom, like Japan and China, adopted Western methods with great success. Other regions, especially those colonized by Europe, have fared less well. 

“What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.”

France and Germany, for centuries the most powerful nations in Europe, have fought numerous bloody wars against each other, with millions of deaths in the last century alone. The EU helps to tone down the rivalry and, instead, motivates the two nations to focus on trade and prosperity.

“Africa, being a huge continent, has always consisted of different regions, climates, and cultures, but what they all had in common was their isolation from one another and the outside world.”

Africa is almost entire surrounded by seas; internally, it is made of alternating bands of nearly impenetrable geography, beginning with a narrow coastal region that borders the Sahara Desert in the north, passing through the dry Sahel to the vast equatorial jungle, then continuing to open dry country and finally to a temperate southern region. Cross-country transport is difficult at best; native plants and animals are mostly useless to local farmers. A wide diversity of cultures and languages makes inter-African communication a challenge.

“Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles, while its opponents would become anti-Communist.”

For a dissident group to receive Soviet support, it needed to at least pay lip service to the principles of Marxism. Opponents turned to the Americans, dedicated anti-Communists with large wallets. Stable countries without insurgencies have more freedom to pursue mixed economic policies.

“Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.”

China wants to improve its own fortunes, not to reform the world. This makes China easier to deal with than Western nations that have rules about how a country’s government must conduct itself before doing business. To protect its interests, China will defend its trading partners in international forums, even when those partners commit crimes. When America complains about this, China simply points to the US’s record of protecting third-world dictators.

“The Africa of the past was given no choice—its geography shaped it—and then the Europeans engineered most of today’s borders. Now, with its booming populations and developing megacities, it has no choice but to embrace the modern globalized world to which it is so connected. In this, despite all the problems we have seen, it is making huge strides.”

Africa struggles for stability and growth. Arbitrary African borders, set by European colonial powers, cut across natural ethnic, tribal, and geographical regions, making harder the challenge of governance in the region. However slowly, the continent is managing to overcome these obstacles to achieve economic progress. 

“Arab leaders have failed to deliver prosperity or freedom, and the siren call of Islamism, which promises to solve all problems, has proved attractive to many in a region marked by a toxic mix of piety, unemployment, and repression.” 

Like Africa, the Middle East struggles for stability and growth amid arbitrary borders determined by outsiders. On top of this is the regional attraction to authoritarian religious rule as an answer of sorts to the challenges of modernity. Yet worse is the ongoing conflict between the two main religious sects, Sunni and Shia, that inflame regional warfare. 

“In the Middle East, power does indeed flow from the barrel of a gun. Some good citizens of Misrata in Libya may want to develop a liberal democratic party, some might even want to campaign for gay rights; but their choice will be limited if the local de facto power shoots liberal democrats and gays. Iraq is a case in point: a democracy in name only, far from liberal, and a place where people are routinely murdered for being homosexual.” 

Westerners have tried, largely without success, to export democracy and progressive values to the Middle East, where politics, culture, and business are governed by the Muslim religion. Middle Easterners tend to be much less receptive to the idea of individual rights than are the citizens of Europe and the US. It doesn’t help that the West has interfered long and hard in Middle Eastern affairs, stripping themselves of nearly all moral authority in the region. The Middle East will have to decide for itself, and in its own way, the merits of democracy and human rights. Meanwhile, individuals there who practice non-standard lifestyles will do so at their peril.

“In Pakistan there are several nations within one state.” 

Pakistan’s somewhat arbitrary borders with its neighbors are porous, and many of its citizens move in and out of the country without interference. This is especially true in the Afghan border area, where being a Pashtun tribal member is more important than one’s nationality. Several other ethnic groups spill across the borders, and Pakistan’s citizens speak at least five different languages. Punjabi immigrants from the 1947 partition of India have poured in to become the new majority ethnic group, exacerbating tensions with and between the older Pakistani tribes. 

“Americans are staying in both Korea and Japan. There is now a triangular relationship among them [...] Japan and South Korea have plenty to argue about, but will agree that their shared anxiety about China and North Korea will overcome this.” 

Despite their mutual animosity, especially over Japan’s colonization and abuse of Korea during the early twentieth century, both Japan and South Korea understand that the real threat now lies elsewhere. Without a US military presence, the region might soon be overrun by the Chinese. America likely will remain there for decades, and South Korea and Japan will continue to serve as tripwires against Chinese expansionism. 

“Mexico makes its living by supplying consumer goods to America, and as long as Americans consume drugs, Mexicans will supply them—after all, the idea here is to make things that are cheap to produce and sell them at prices higher than those in legal trade. Without drugs the country would be even poorer than it is, as a vast amount of foreign money would be cut off. With drugs it is even more violent than it would be.”

Contraband costs a lot to smuggle, but the return on investment is so strong that drug cartels must fight to protect their delivery routes. Lacking a strong tradition against corruption, the Mexican government is easily bought off, and the gangs have become the law of the land, enforcing their will with private armies. Since the cartels don’t have courts or prisons, their conflict resolution is carried out with bullets and bombs.

“All the [Arctic’s] sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears—the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose. Until recently the riches were theoretical, but the melting ice has made the theoretical probable, and in some cases certain.” 

The Arctic region holds huge deposits of oil, gas, and minerals, as well as the possibility of a shorter shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. All of this, however, has been buried under millions of square miles of ice until recently. Now global warming is melting the ice pack around the edges, making possible the exploitation of the continental shelves beneath. Control of these riches is still up in the air, with decisions—and possible military conflict—to be settled among the eight nations that border the Arctic and the dozens of other countries who also yearn for a piece of the action in the polar realm. 

“Our history has shown us the rapacious way of the zero-sum game. Arguably, a belief in partial geographic determinism, coupled with human nature, made it difficult for it to have been any other way. However, there are examples of how technology has helped us break out from the prison of geography [;] that technology was made by us, and, in our newly globalized world, can be used to give us an opportunity in the Arctic. We can overcome the rapacious side of our nature, and get the Great Game right for the benefit of all.” 

Modern technology makes it possible to overcome the physical limitations of geography. Advanced communications, air transport, canals, icebreakers, huge cargo vessels, and improved road materials make possible the development of regions previously inaccessible and the breaching of barriers long impassible. These new powers can be used for economic growth or misused in war.