Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
two oceans that gave Americans the luxury of their idealism, it was also that these two
oceans gave America direct access to the two principal arteries of politics and commerce
in the world: Europe across the Atlantic and East Asia across the Pacific, with the riches
America by thousands of miles from other continents, have given America a virulent strain
of isolationism that has persisted to this day. Indeed, except in its own sphere of influence
in the Americas, the United States zealously resisted great power politics for almost two
hundred years: even the breakdown of the European state system in 1940 failed to bring
America into World War II. It took an attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to do that. Following
the war, the United States once more withdrew from the world, until the aggression of the
Soviet Union and North Korea's attack on South Korea forced its troops back to Europe
between quasi-isolationism and idealist-minded interventionism: all of this at root because
of two oceans.
Geography “has been forgotten, not conquered,” writes the Johns Hopkins University
merit to be called a plausible fallacy,” writes Colin S. Gray, a longtime advisor on military
strategy to the British and American governments. It is not only that, as we've seen in
Iraq and Afghanistan, “the exercise of continuous influence or control requires,” in Gray's
words, “the physical presence of armed people in the area at issue,” it is that anyone who
truly believes that geography has been pivotally downgraded is profoundly ignorant of mil-
itary logistics—of the science of getting significant quantities of men and matériel from
one continent to another. What I had experienced in traveling with the 1st Marine Divi-
sion overland through Iraq was only a small part of that logistics exercise, which included
getting men and equipment thousands of miles by ship from North America to the Persian
Gulf. In a strikingly clairvoyant analysis in 1999, the American military historian Willi-
amson Murray wrote that the approaching new century would make the United States con-
front once again the “harsh geographic reality” imposed by two oceans, which limit and
make almost insanely expensive the deployment of our ground troops to far-off locales.
While some wars and rescue missions may be quickly concluded by airborne “raiding”
(one thinks of the Israeli attack on Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976 to rescue hijacked
plane passengers), even in those operations, terrain matters. Terrain determines the pace
and method of fighting. The Falklands War of 1982 unfolded slowly because of the mari-
time environment, while the flat deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991 mag-
nified the effect of air power, even as holding vast and heavily populated stretches of Iraq
in the Second Gulf War showed the limits of air power and thus made American forces
