The Revenge Of Geography: What The Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts And The Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

This is a book that it is easy to like in parts, but not as easy to appreciate when taken in the context of the author’s own strident and biased political perspective as well as the author’s body of a work as a whole. As is common among members of the consultant class of which this author is a part, there is a clear aim in this book of the author seeking to give advice that is heeded by policymakers and that also aims at a midbrow audience of readers that might share the author’s contempt for traditionalists in general. The author has some worthwhile insights to make about the importance of geography and the worth of knowing the reality of geography so that one can resist what seems like a predetermined fate, but the book itself is so wishy washy in its conclusions that it seeks to be seen as a prophetic success no matter how the future turns out, and in the author’s pessimism that Russia would seek to reverse Ukraine’s westward turn by force and his belief that Syria’s government would quickly fall to the Arab Spring and that the post-Mubarak Islamists would long rule Egypt, the author clearly was no great prophet, it must be admitted.

Overall, this book is 350 pages, and is divided into three unequal parts and fifteen chapters. The book begins with a preface that discusses the matter of frontiers in the author’s own travel and writings. The first part of this book looks at visionaries of geographical thinking that the author seeks to either rehabilitate or critique as a way of giving a nuanced perspective of his own liberal vision of geopolitics (I). The first chapter looks at the connection between the post-Cold War hopes of Central Europe and the ugly realities of the Iraq War (1). This is followed by a titular chapter on the revenge of geography and its growing importance (2). There is a discussion of Herodotus and his successors as historians (3), as well as a look at the map of Eurasia and its importance to Mackinder (4). The author then turns his attention to the Nazi distortion of geopolitics that gave the term ill repute (5), spends a chapter discussing the rimland thesis that came about during World War II (6), and spends some time discussing the allure of sea power to the United States and other coastal or island powers (7). This part of the book then ends with a discussion of the contemporary age and near future as being a crisis of room (8) where people struggle to find space for themselves. The second part of the book gives a regional look at the map of the early 21st century (II), with a discussion of the geography of European divisions (9). This is followed by a chapter that looks at Russia and its independent neighbors in the heartland of Eurasia (10). After that comes a discussion of the geography of Chinese power and its own insecurity (11). A further chapter discusses India’s geographical dilemma (12), and the final two chapters of this section focus on the possible importance of Iran (13), and the former Ottoman Empire (14) as possible middle powers to mediate between Central Asia, China, India, and Europe. The third part of the book consists of one chapter that discusses America’s supposed need to focus on Mexico and the demographic threat of Latin America rather than on the Middle East (15).

Where the author is at his best is when he is not trying to settle personal scores about his hostility to right-of-center defenders of Israel or conservative religious folk or people at Fox News or trying to puff himself up as a wise reader of the tea leaves of current events and current maps or uttering the usual comments against the maps made by imperialist Europeans which, as sad as they are, no national government really wants to change because of the fear that they will lose power over the regions they currently claim, however ill-suited those maps may be to responsible popular government, but when he is trying to praise other peoples and cultures. It is not that the author needs to think less of himself, but rather that he ought to think about himself less often. As is the case with many writers, what is most interesting is hearing his perspective about the endurance of culture and geography and the influence that where we live and under what conditions we live have on our choices, on our insecurities, on the options that we find most appealing, and what is least interesting about this author and his works is the way he thinks of himself as a wise guide to areas of knowledge where is insight is only partial, at best.