Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
As for the southern half of South America, geography works to marginalize its geopol-
itical importance, Spykman explains. The west coast of South America is crushed between
the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, the highest mountain range in the world save for the knot
of the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Pamirs, which separate China from the Indian Subcon-
tinent. The valleys through the Andes, compared with those through the Appalachians that
give the east coast of America access westward, are narrow and few. The rivers are not
navigable, so that countries such as Chile and Peru, eight thousand miles across the Pa-
cific from East Asia, and many thousands of miles from either coast of the United States,
are far from the main global channels of communication and historical migration, and thus
cannot raise great navies. Only central and southern Chile lie in the temperate zone, and
as Henry Kissinger once reportedly quipped, Chile is a dagger thrust at Antarctica. As for
the east coast of South America, it is, too, remote and isolated. Because South America
does not lie directly below North America, but to its east, the populated parts of South
America's Atlantic coast, from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires—far to the south, below the
thickly wooded Amazon—are no closer to New York than they are to Lisbon. Dominating
the American Mediterranean, and separated from the heart of South America by yawning
distance and a wide belt of tropical forest, the United States has few challengers in its own
hemisphere. The Southern Cone of South America, Spykman writes, is less a “continental
neighbor” than an “overseas territory.”
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But there is a negative flip side to much of this. Yes, the Caribbean basin unites rather
than divides, and the trail of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia through Central Amer-
ica and Mexico to the United States shows this in action. The so-called drug war is a salient
lesson in geography, which now threatens the U.S. in its hemispheric backyard. The same
with the populist, anti-American radicalism of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who
has been an affront to American global interests not simply because he has been allied with
Russia and Iran, but because he has been allied with Russia and Iran from his perch on the
Caribbean basin: were he situated below the Amazon rainforest in the Southern Cone, he
would have been less of a threat. Globalization—the Information Age, the collapsing of
distance, the explosion of labor migration from demographically young countries to demo-
graphically graying countries—has brought the U.S. into an uncomfortably closer relation-
ship with an unstable Latin America around the Caribbean. Whereas the Caribbean was
previously a place that the U.S. Navy dominated, but which was otherwise separated from
the main currents of American society, it is now part of the very fabric of American life.
Spykman's ideas presage these developments, even as, obviously, he could not have pre-
dicted their specifics.
Writing in the midst of World War II like Strausz-Hupé, before the fortunes of war turned
in the Allies' favor, the worldwide threat posed by the Nazis was uppermost in Spykman's
mind. Consequently, he saw the separation of the United States from southern South Amer-
