Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
THE “CRISIS OF ROOM”
As a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis some years back, I taught a
course about future challenges in national security. I started the semester by having the mid-
shipmen read
Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear
Age
by Yale political science professor Paul Bracken. A brief and clairvoyant tour de force
that sold poorly when it was published in 1999, Bracken's topic is very much in the spirit of
Mackinder and Spykman, even as there are no references to them in his text. Bracken, who
has served as a consultant to nearly all Post Cold War American government reassessments,
draws a conceptual map of Eurasia defined by the ongoing collapse of time and distance,
and the filling up of empty spaces—something that William McNeill first alerted us to in the
latter chapters of his grand history of humanity. But because Bracken writes during a more
dramatic stage of this development, this leads him to declare a “crisis of room.” Bracken
refers to the idea of the great Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann, who
contended that in the past a sparsely populated geography had acted as a safety mechanism
against military and technological advances. Yet von Neumann worried that geography was
now losing the battle. Undeniably, the very “finite size of the earth” would increasingly be a
force for instability, as military hardware and software condensed distances on the geopolit-
ical map. “This is an easy change to miss,” Bracken warns, “because it is gradual.”
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Let me condense Bracken's thesis into a few pages. For it matters greatly to the develop-
ment of my own.
While the Americans and Europeans focus on globalization, the appeal of nationalism and
military power is growing in Eurasia. Missile and bomb tests, biological warfare programs,
and the development of chemical weapons are “the products of a prosperous, liberalizing
Asia,” Bracken notes. What the West has “failed to recognize” is that the technologies of
war and wealth creation have always been closely connected: from Asia's economic rise
has come its military rise. In the early Cold War years, Asian military forces were primar-
ily lumbering, World War II-type armies whose primary purpose, though never stated, was
national consolidation. “The army was an instrument of mass indoctrination, a giant school
with a core curriculum of nationhood.” Soldiers helped bring in the crops more often than
they honed their battlefield skills. Thus, armies were focused inward, even as many a state
army was separated by enormous tracts of mileage from other state armies. But as national
wealth accumulated and the computer revolution took hold, Asian militaries from the oil-
rich Middle East to the tiger economies of the Pacific developed full-fledged, military-ci-
vilian postindustrial complexes, with missiles and fiber optics and cellular phones. At the
same time, Eurasian states were becoming bureaucratically more cohesive, allowing their
militaries and their leaders to focus outward and away from domestic politics, toward other
states—becoming more lethal and professional in the process. Rather than retreat into the
