Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
countryside in the face of danger, an option in epochs past, now electronic sensors monit-
or international borders with weapons of mass destruction at the ready. Geography, rather
than a cushion, has become a prison from which there is no escape.
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“An unbroken belt of countries from Israel to North Korea” (including Syria, Iran,
Pakistan, India, and China) “has assembled either nuclear or chemical arsenals and is de-
veloping ballistic missiles. A multipolar balance of terror stretches over a 6,000-mile arc,”
cutting across military and political theaters and “regional studies” departments into which
the West divides up Asia. The “death of distance” is upon us, Bracken warns. Take Japan,
which ever since North Korea in 1998 fired a missile across it, landing in the Pacific Ocean,
is no longer a zone of sanctuary, but an integral part of mainland Asia military space, des-
pite its archipelagic geography. Over the centuries, the concept of Asia was created by
Western maritime power, beginning with the Portuguese at the turn of the sixteenth century.
It was then deconstructed into separate regions by the Cold War. But in the 1970s, as an
economic boom swept East Asia, a large and new region, the “Pacific Basin,” was formed,
the basis for a return to a holistic map of Asia. This economic success story was possible
only because the threat of force was unthinkable: that, in turn, was because there was a
military hegemon, the United States, which guaranteed the peace. Now, as Asia returns to
being a single organic unit, U.S. power is slowly receding and the military power of China,
India, and other indigenous states is rising. Asia is enlarging as regional subunits collapse.
It is getting more claustrophobic because of the expansion of both populations and missile
ranges; and it is becoming more volatile, because of the accumulation of weaponry without
concomitant alliance structures.
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As Bracken explains, because of its immense size, for most of history alliances never
mattered much in Asia, as armies were too far removed from one another to come to one
another's aid. This was unlike the situation in Europe where many powerful states were
bunched up against one another in a narrow peninsula. But that is now changing. Across
Eurasia missiles and weapons of mass destruction are being built, not infantry forces. The
naval and marine patrols of various states, pulsing with technology, are ranging far from
home ports in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. China, Japan, India, Israel, and oth-
er nations are developing communications grids using satellites and underwater listening
devices. India, which for most of history found China largely irrelevant to its security con-
cerns, because the two countries were separated by the highest mountains in the world,
now has its own satellites and reconnaissance aircraft providing details of Chinese troop
movements in Tibet. Meanwhile, the Indian navy has set up a Far Eastern Command in the
Andaman Islands, 750 miles east of India proper, to counter a Chinese naval presence that
is also far from its home shores. As “Asian industrial power becomes aligned with Asian
military power,” Bracken writes, the continent is literally running out of room for mistakes
and miscalculations, becoming, in effect, “the shrinking Eurasian chessboard.”
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