Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
part of Alfred Thayer Mahan's debatable ground. Indeed, the supreme fact of twenty-first-
century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is
also the most unstable.
In the Middle East we have, in the words of the scholars Geoffrey Kemp and Robert
E. Harkavy, a “vast quadrilateral,” where Europe, Russia, Asia, and Africa intersect: with
the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert to the west; the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the
Caspian Sea, and the Central Asian steppe-land to the north; the Hindu Kush and the Indian
quadrilateral does not constitute one massive state; nor, like the Indian Subcontinent, is it
even overwhelmingly dominated by one state, which might provide it with at least some
semblance of coherence. Nor is it, like Europe, a group of states within highly regulated al-
liance structures (NATO, the European Union). Rather, the Middle East is characterized by
a disorderly and bewildering array of kingdoms, sultanates, theocracies, democracies, and
military-style autocracies, whose common borders look formed as if by an unsteady knife.
To no surprise of the reader, this whole region, which includes North Africa, the Horn of
Africa, Central Asia, and, to a degree, the Indian Subcontinent, constitutes, in effect, one
densely packed axis of instability, where continents, historic road networks, and sea lanes
converge. What is more, this region comprises 70 percent of the world's proven oil reserves
mentioned by Yale professor Paul Bracken: extremist ideologies, crowd psychology, over-
lapping missile ranges, and profit-driven mass media as dedicated to their point of view as
Fox News is to its. In fact, with the exception of the Korean Peninsula, nuclear prolifera-
tion is more of a factor in the Middle East than in any other area.
The Middle East is also in the midst of a youth bulge, in which 65 percent of the popu-
lation is under the age of thirty. Between 1995 and 2025, the populations of Iraq, Jordan,
Kuwait, Oman, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Yemen will have doubled. Young
populations, as we have seen in the Arab Spring, are the most likely to force upheaval and
change. The next generation of Middle Eastern rulers, whether in Iran or in the Arab states,
will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as their predecessors, even as democratic
experiments in the region show that while elections are easily accomplished, stable and lib-
eral democratic orders are processes that can take generations to refine. In the Middle East,
youth bulges and the communications revolution have ignited a string of messy, Mexico-
style scenarios (the replacement of decisive one-party states with more chaotic multifac-
tional and multiparty ones), but without Mexico's level of institutionalization, which, as
limited as it is, remains ahead of most countries in the Middle East. Dealing with an authen-
tically democratic Mexico has been harder for the United States than with a Mexico under
effective one-party rule. Bristling with advanced armaments, to say nothing of weapons of
mass destruction, the Middle East of the next few decades will make the recent era of Arab-
