BRAUDEL, MEXICO, AND GRAND STRATEGY - The Revenge of Geography - page 237

better trained, doctrinally more flexible, and intellectually more subtle than ever. The same
goes for the Marine Corps.
Not in Iraq, nor in Afghanistan, did the United States make the kind of pivotal blunder
that late medieval Venice did. It wasn't only Venice's privileged geographical position
between western and eastern Mediterranean trade routes that allowed it to create a seaborne
empire; rather, it was the fact that Venice was protected from the Italian mainland by a
few miles of water, and protected by invasion from the sea by long sandbars. One cause
of Venice's decline starting in the fifteenth century was its decision to become a power on
mainland Italy. By going to war repeatedly against Verona, Padua, Florence, Milan, and
the League of Cambrai, Venice was no longer detached from “deadly” balance-of-power
politics on land, and this had an adverse effect on its ability to project sea power. 8 The
Venetian example should cause alarm among American policymakers if—and only if—the
United States were to make a habit of military interventions on land in the Greater Middle
East. But if America can henceforth restrict itself to being an air and sea power, it can
easily avoid Venice's fate. It is the permanence of small wars that can undo us, not the odd,
once every third of a century miscalculation, however much tragedy and consternation that
causes.
In this light, Iraq during the worst fighting in 2006 and 2007 might be compared to the
Indian Mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the orientalists and other prag-
matists in the British power structure, who wanted to leave traditional India as it was, lost
some sway to evangelical and utilitarian reformers who wanted to modernize and Christi-
anize India—to make it more like England. But the attempt to bring the fruits of Western
civilization to the Indian Subcontinent were met with a revolt against imperial authority.
Delhi, Luknow, and other cities were besieged and captured before being retaken by colo-
nial forces. Yet the debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded
even for another century. Instead, it signaled the transition from an ad hoc imperium fired
by an evangelical lust to impose its values to a calmer and more pragmatic empire built on
international trade and technology. 9
Ancient history, too, offers up examples that cast doubt on whether Afghanistan and Iraq,
in and of themselves, have doomed us. Famously, there is the Sicilian Expedition recoun-
ted by Thucydides in the Sixth Book of The Peloponnesian War . Fourteen years elapsed
from Athens's first foray into Sicily to its final disaster there in the naval battle of Syra-
cuse in 413 B.C ., the same number of years between the early forays of the John F. Kennedy
administration in Vietnam and President Gerald Ford's final withdrawal after Saigon was
overrun. The Sicilian War split the home front in Athens, as did the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
Paralyzed by pessimism and recriminations, it was some time before Athenians were will-
ing to resume in earnest the bipolar conflict with Sparta. Sicily, as it turned out, had not
been altogether crucial to the survival of Athens's democracy and its maritime empire. For