BRAUDEL, MEXICO, AND GRAND STRATEGY - The Revenge of Geography - page 233

ical organization.” 3 Braudel, who unlike Mackinder, Spykman, or Mahan lacks a specif-
ic theory of geopolitics for us to investigate, nevertheless achieves something greater. For
he is more than a geographer or strategist. He is a historian whose narrative has a godlike
quality in which every detail of human existence is painted against the canvas of natural
forces. If geography ever approaches literature, it does so with Braudel. In a sense, he is a
summation of all the strategic thinkers we have encountered thus far.
Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes that perhaps Braudel's signal contribution to
the way in which history is perceived is his concept of “varying wavelengths of time.” At
the base is the longue durée: slow, imperceptibly changing geographical time, “of land-
scapes that enable and constrain.” Above this, at a faster wavelength, come the “medium-
term cycles,” what Braudel himself refers to as conjonctures , that is, systemic changes in
demographics, economics, agriculture, society, and politics. Cunliffe explains that these are
essentially “collective forces, impersonal and usually restricted in time to no more than a
century.” Together the longue durée and conjonctures provide the largely hidden “basic
structures” against which human life is played out. My very highlighting of geography has
been designed to put emphasis on these basic structures. Braudel calls the shortest-term
cycle l'histoire événmentielle —the daily vicissitudes of politics and diplomacy that are the
staple of media coverage. Braudel's analogy is the sea: in the deepest depths is the sluggish
movement of water masses that bear everything; above that the tides and swells; and finally
at the surface, in Cunliffe's words, “the transient flecks of surf, whipped up and gone in a
minute.” 4
It is impossible to speculate on how geopolitics will play out over the inhuman time-
frame of much of Braudel's analysis, especially given the controversy over climate change
and its effects on specific regions. To talk about relations between, say, America and
Europe a hundred or two hundred years hence is ridiculous, because of so many factors
that have yet to even appear. Rather, think of Braudel as simply encouraging us to take
a more distant and dispassionate view of our own foibles. For example, reading Braudel,
with the events of the first decade of the twenty-first century uppermost in one's mind, it is
impossible to avoid the question: Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan transient flecks of
surf only; or are they part of something deeper, more profound, and structural in America's
destiny? For that matter, might World War I and World War II even, which saw violence
on a scale never before experienced in history, belong merely to l'histoire événmentielle ?
Braudel, precisely because he places the events of humankind against the pressure of nat-
ural forces, facilitates thinking in terms of the longue durée .
I offer up Braudel as prologue to a remarkable moment at a Washington conference in June
2009, where a question was raised that gives particular urgency to my inquiry on the rel-
evance of geography for the United States in the twenty-first century. It was a question