What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate
Random House
September 2012
On Sale: September 11, 2012
432 pages ISBN: 1400069831 EAN: 9781400069835 Kindle: B007MDJY5K Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan,
the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan
Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to
view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for
continents and countries around the world.
In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds
on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great
geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and
distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and
then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan
traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining
their climates, topographies, and proximities to other
embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and
limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on
destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians
distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on
the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union
could be swallowed by a greater German homeland.
Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the
present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian
subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The
result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of
conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be
understood in the context of temperature, land allotment,
and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23
percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent
arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such
brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in
moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous
borders will keep it the principal invasion route into
India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main
enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only
country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the
Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits
that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung
conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to
its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of
becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage.
A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that
globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work
shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent
this century’s looming cataclysms
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