HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS - The Revenge of Geography - page 36

the remotest places are separated by only a few days, or hours, as in our time? The world
was, in a sense, united in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that world bears little
relation in terms of demography and technology to that of the early twenty-first. The core
drama of our own age, as we shall see, is the steady filling up of space, making for a truly
closed geography where states and militaries have increasingly less room to hide. Whereas
mechanized, early-modern armies of a century ago had to cross many miles to reach each
other, now there are overlapping ranges of missiles. Geography does not disappear in this
scenario, it just becomes, as we shall see, even more critical.
To look at the argument in another way, let me return to Morgenthau. Morgenthau writes
that the very imperial expansion into relatively empty geographical spaces in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, in Africa, Eurasia, and western North America, deflected great
power politics into the periphery of the earth, thereby reducing conflict. For example, the
more attention Russia, France, and the United States paid to expanding into far-flung ter-
ritories in imperial fashion, the less attention they paid to one another, and the more peace-
ful, in a sense, the world was. 24 But by the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of the
great nation-states and empires of the West was consummated, and territorial gains could
only be made at the expense of one another. 25 Morgenthau sums up:
As the balance of power—with its main weight now in three contin-
ents—becomes worldwide, the dichotomy between the circle of the great power
and its center, on the one hand, and its periphery and the empty spaces beyond,
on the other, must of necessity disappear. The periphery of the balance of power
now coincides with the confines of the earth. 26
Whereas Morgenthau's vision, written during the tense, early Cold War years, spells
danger, that of his university colleague McNeill, written in a later, more stable phase of the
Cold War, spells hope:
The Han in ancient China … put a quietus upon the disorders of the warring
states by erecting an imperial bureaucratic structure which endured, with occa-
sional breakdown and modest amendment, almost to our own day. The warring
states of the twentieth century seem headed for a similar resolution of their con-
flicts. 27
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 certainly seems to have borne out McNeill's optim-
ism. Yet the world is arguably as dangerous today as it was during the Cold War. For the
map keeps closing in a multiplicity of ways. Take China: Mao Zedong, at great cost to be
sure, consolidated China as a modern state, and China now rises economically (albeit at a
slower pace) and militarily as a great power, filling up the Eurasian chessboard even more