Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
so do
poor man's nukes
and other disruptive technologies change the global balance of
power.
7
The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia “makes the world less Eurocentric,” and thus
intimate as the geography of Europe, where a myriad of powerful states, uncomfortably
confined within a small space, constantly fought wars, with peace breaking out just as con-
stantly through the practice of balance of power politics. There will not be the accumula-
tion of masses of thermonuclear warheads that we saw during the Cold War, so that the
peace and stability obtained by mutually assured destruction will not necessarily result,
even as the damage one state will be able to do to another will be immense and—in a world
of crowded megacities—nearly beyond comprehension. Thus, a closed geography will de-
mand the ablest practitioners of Metternichian balance of power statecraft in order to pre-
vent mass violence.
To be sure, we may be entering a world of multidimensional brinkmanship. The shrink-
ing of the map not only obliterates artificial regions invented by Cold War area studies, but
also renders less distinct Mackinder's and Spykman's conception of a specific pivot and ad-
jacent rimlands, since Eurasia has been reconfigured by technology into an organic whole.
For example, military assistance from China and North Korea to Iran can cause Israel at
the other end of the Eurasian landmass to take specific military actions. Because of vivid
television images, bombs falling on Gaza can now incite crowds in Indonesia. The U.S. Air
Force can attack landlocked Afghanistan from the island of Diego Garcia in the middle of
the Indian Ocean. While local militaries used to be confined to their regions, increasingly
the Chinese and Indian navies will be projecting power from the Gulf of Aden all the way
to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan—along the whole navigable rimland, that is.
There are many more such examples of political situations in one part of Eurasia echoing
and reechoing back from other parts. This does not negate geography, it just means that we
have to add other factors to it. It no longer reigns supreme to the extent that it used to.
The worries of Mackinder and Spykman will not only be intensified by the disruptive tech-
nologies that Bracken concentrates on, but by the sheer rise of urban populations them-
selves, which will make the map of Eurasia only more claustrophobic. In the 1990s, during
the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War, when the terms “realist” and “determin-
ist” were vilified in the heady days following the overthrow of communism, the ideas of
the late-eighteenth century English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus were mocked by
many intellectuals as too grim and fatalistic: for Malthus treats humankind as a species
reacting to its physical environment, rather than as a body of self-willed individuals mo-
tivated by ideas. Malthus's specific theory—that population increases geometrically while
food supplies increase only arithmetically—was wrong. Yet as the years pass, with great
