Revenge of Geography (eBook)

Kaplan / REVENGE GEOGRAPHY

Chapter I

FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD

To recover our sense of geography, we first must fix the moment in recent history when we most profoundly lost it, explain why we lost it, and elucidate how that affected our assumptions about the world. Of course, such a loss is gradual. But the moment I have isolated, when that loss seemed most acute, was immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Though an artificial border whose crumbling should have enhanced our respect for geography and the relief map--and what that map might have foreshadowed in the adjacent Balkans and the Middle East--the Berlin Wall's erasure made us blind to the real geographical impediments that still divided us, and still awaited us.

For suddenly we were in a world in which the dismantling of a man-made boundary in Germany had led to the assumption that all human divisions were surmountable, that democracy would conquer Africa and the Middle East as easily as it had Eastern Europe, that globalization--soon to become a buzzword--was nothing less than a moral direction of history and a system of international security, rather than what it actually was, merely an economic and cultural stage of development. Consider: a totalitarian ideology had just been vanquished, even as domestic security in the United States and Western Europe was being taken for granted. The semblance of peace reigned generally. Presciently capturing the zeitgeist, a former deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Francis Fukuyama, published an article a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 'The End of History,' proclaiming that while wars and rebellions would continue, history in a Hegelian sense was over now, since the success of capitalist liberal democracies had ended the argument over which system of government was best for humankind.1 Thus, it was just a matter of shaping the world more in our own image, sometimes through the deployment of American troops, deployments that in the 1990s would exact relatively little penalty. This, the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War, was an era of illusions. It was a time when the words 'realist' and 'pragmatist' were considered pejoratives, signifying an aversion to humanitarian intervention in places where the national interest, as conventionally and narrowly defined, seemed elusive. Better in those days to be a neoconservative or liberal internationalist, who were thought of as good, smart people who simply wanted to stop genocide in the Balkans.

Such a burst of idealism in the United States was not unprecedented. Victory in World War I had unfurled the banner of 'Wilsonianism,' a notion associated with President Woodrow Wilson that, as it would turn out, took little account of the real goals of America's European allies and even less account of the realities of the Balkans and the Near East, where, as events in the 1920s would show, democracy and freedom from the imperial overlordship of the Ottoman Turks meant mainly heightened ethnic awareness of a narrow sort in the individual parts of the old sultanate. It was a similar phenomenon that followed the West's victory in the Cold War, which many believed would simply bring freedom and prosperity under the banners of 'democracy' and 'free markets.' Many suggested that even Africa, the poorest and least stable continent, further burdened with the world's most artificial and illogical borders, might also be on the brink of a democratic revolution, as if the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the heart of Europe held supreme meaning for the world's least developed nations, separated by sea and desert thousands of...