THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY - The Revenge of Geography - page 27

fate, secured ultimately in the facts of geography, in order to curb excessive zeal in foreign
policy, a zeal of which I myself have been guilty.
The more we can curb this zeal, the more successful will be the interventions in which
we do take part, and the more successful these interventions are, the more leeway our poli-
cymakers will have in the court of public opinion to act likewise in the future.
I am aware that I am on dangerous ground in raising geography on a pedestal. I will, there-
fore, in the course of this study, try to keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin's admonition from
his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title
“Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that
vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics de-
termine our lives and the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and
Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than the indi-
viduals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “Tradition” and “History” as
“wiser than we.” 30 For Berlin, the individual and his moral responsibility are paramount,
and he or she cannot therefore blame his or her actions—or fate—altogether, or in great
part, on such factors as landscape and culture. The motives of human beings matter very
much to history; they are not illusions explained away by references to larger forces. The
map is a beginning, not an end to interpreting the past and present.
Of course, geography, history, and ethnic characteristics influence but do not determine
future events. Nevertheless, today's foreign policy challenges simply cannot be solved, and
wise choices cannot be made, without substantial reference to these very factors, which
Berlin, in his sweeping attack on all forms of determinism, seems at first glance to reject.
Reliance on geography and ethnic and sectarian factors could have served us well in anti-
cipating the violence in both the Balkans, following the end of the Cold War, and in Iraq,
following the U.S. invasion of 2003. Nevertheless, Berlin's moral challenge holds up well
so far as framing the debates that have taken place in the course of the past two decades,
about where and where not to deploy American troops abroad.
So what to do? How do we split the difference between recognizing the importance of
geography in shaping history and the danger of overemphasizing that very fact? We can
take harbor, I think, in Raymond Aron's notion of a “sober ethic rooted in the truth of
'probabilistic determinism,' ” because “human choice always operates within certain con-
tours or restraints such as the inheritance of the past.” 31 The key word is “probabilistic,”
that is, in now concentrating on geography we adhere to a partial or hesitant determinism
which recognizes obvious differences between groups and terrain, but does not oversim-
plify, and leaves many possibilities open. As English historian Norman Davies writes: “I
have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist,