Want to understand the political insecurity of China's leaders or Iran's resilience in the face of Western sanctions? The best place to start is with a map, says Robert D. Kaplan, discussing his new book with WSJ's Gary Rosen.
Geography Strikes Back -- Robert Kaplan, Wall Street Journal
To understand today's global conflicts, forget economics and technology and take a hard look at a map, writes Robert D. Kaplan
If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don't read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government's aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources. With upheaval in the Middle East and a tumultuous political transition in China, look to geography to make sense of it all.
As a way of explaining world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics, globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of imagination.
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My Comment: Throughout history the invasion routes have always been the same. Central Europe, the steppes of Russia, the Middle East .... the routes that invading armies have had to take have never really altered.
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