The Dutch-American writer Nicholas Spykman observed in 1944 that “geography is the most fundamental factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent.” Many thinkers treated geography and geopolitics as passé fields of study after America's victories in the Cold War and against Iraq in the early 1990s. Instead, many U.S. policymakers accepted a vision of the world that might be described as “strategic happy talk,” a misguided view forever distilled in Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat (2005)—his paean to the belief that interdependence and cooperation had replaced competition in international affairs, with the gratifying result that peace and prosperity would perpetuate and reinforce themselves. To a great extent, those rosy assumptions shaped the policies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Unfortunately, this century's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure of the Russian “reset,” Europe's self-induced travails, China's seemingly relentless military rise, and the failure of Islamic states to embrace liberal democracy reveal that strategic happy talk continues to run up against geopolitical reality.
A Herodotus for Our Time
Enter the anti-Friedman, Robert Kaplan, regular contributor to the Atlantic and fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). His 18 books and scores of articles, which explain why the world is definitely not flat, have established him as one of the most consequential geopolitical thinkers of our time. He achieved that stature less for his originality than for his ability to synthesize longstanding but neglected concepts and insights into a coherent understanding. The military historian John Keegan called geography the “Rosetta Stone of battles.” Kaplan shows that geography is also the Rosetta Stone of world history.
Rather than negating geography, he argues, technology has only made the world “smaller and more claustrophobic, so that each patch of earth is more dearly held and more closely contested than ever before, while each region and crisis zone is more interconnected with every other one as never before.” The shrinkage and crowding of the globe means a world of never-ending, rapid-fire crises, which should encourage us to be prudent when considering foreign intervention.
Kaplan describes himself as a realist, arguing that realism is a “sensibility” rooted in a “mature sense of the tragic.” The realist recognizes that he must work with the elemental causes of war identified by Thucydides—honor, fear, and interest—rather than against them. His books are part travel narrative, part geopolitical treatise, combining remarkable observational talents with strategic insights. His method for understanding the world is captured by a diplomat's comment that Kaplan noted in The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1993): “Read, travel, read, travel, that's the way to go.” Kaplan not only travels through the world's regions but also “travels” through scholars' ideas, testing his own concepts against theirs. One sees this in his essays on such exemplary realists as Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer.
Kaplan is the contemporary heir to Herodotus, the great observer of human affairs. While Herodotus is described as the first historian, the correct translation of the title of his work, The Histories, is Inquiries. Herodotus the Greek was inquiring into the ways of the other peoples with whom the Greeks were in contact, especially the Persians, Scythians, and Egyptians. One result of his inquiries was the conviction that each of these peoples was shaped to some degree by its territorial setting. Kaplan, following Herodotus, understands that cultures and civilizations continually interact in time and space and are therefore shaped by geographic realities. He explicitly acknowledges Herodotus in The Revenge of Geography (2012), which includes a tour d'horizon of the works of earlier geopolitical thinkers, especially Marshall G.S. Hodgson and William H. McNeill, who challenged Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler's belief that separate civilizations pursued their destinies more or less independently of one another.
Geopolitical thinkers are often dismissed as determinists who believe that geography is destiny. Kaplan shows that, for the most part, these writers' arguments are far from deterministic: only the main directions of a state's proper strategy may be deduced from its geographical situation. Thus, the strategies of commercial seafaring peoples like Athens, Great Britain, and the United States have differed from those of land-based Sparta, Germany, and Russia.
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