Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the severe restraints with which geography burdened us in places such as Mesopotamia and
Afghanistan.
And yet within this sad acceptance there is hope: for by becoming more expert at reading
the map, we can, helped by technology as the Arab Spring has attested, stretch some of the
limits the map inflicts. That is the aim of my study—to have an appreciation of the map
so that, counterintuitively, we need not always be bounded by it. For it is not only narrow-
mindedness that leads to isolationism, but the overstretching of resources that causes an
isolationist backlash.
But first we need to recognize the very centrality of the geographical discipline. “Nature
imposes; man disposes,” writes the English geographer W. Gordon East. Certainly, man's
are extremely broad, so that human agency has more than enough room to maneuver. For
the Arabs, it turns out, are as capable of democratic practices as any group, even as the
spatial arrangement of Libyan tribes and of the mountain ranges in Yemen will continue to
play crucial roles in those countries' political development. Geography informs, rather than
determines. Geography, therefore, is not synonymous with fatalism. But it is, like the distri-
bution of economic and military power themselves, a major constraint on—and instigator
of—the actions of states.
Yale professor Nicholas J. Spykman, the great Dutch American strategist of the
early-World War II era, wrote in 1942 that “geography does not argue. It simply is.” He
goes on:
Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because
it is the most permanent. Ministers come and go, even dictators die, but mountain
ranges stand unperturbed. George Washington, defending thirteen states with a
ragged army, has been succeeded by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the resources
of a continent at his command, but the Atlantic continues to separate Europe
from the United States and the ports of the St. Lawrence River are still blocked
by winter ice. Alexander I, Czar of all the Russias, bequeathed to Joseph Stalin,
simple member of the Communist party, not only his power but his endless
struggle for access to the sea, and Maginot and Clemenceau have inherited from
Caesar and Louis XIV anxiety over the open German frontier.
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And one might add, that despite 9/11 even, the Atlantic Ocean still matters, and, in fact,
it is the Atlantic that declares a different foreign and military policy for the United States
compared to that of Europe. In the same vein, we can say that Russia, unto this day, is an in-
secure and sprawling land power, the victim of invasions since before those of the Mongol
